A simple social grace extended by Duterte to Kian’s parents made all the difference

The irony that escapes Yellowtards is that they now see themselves as “victims” of a system they supposedly “fought” for. If only somebody had warned them back in their golden years that spanned the 1980s through the 1990s and the 2000s: Be careful what you wish for.

Indeed, everything they are now tearing their hair out over is a product of the “freedoms” enshrined in the 1987 Yellowtard Constitution — that overcompensation of a charter flubbed upon Filipinos by the late former President Cory Aquino that embodied the national trauma Filipinos thought they suffered from as a result of the “Marcos regime”. The buzzwords of the time, “people power”, the “will of the people”, “majority rules”, and the “wisdom of the crowds” captured the essence of this embrace of the freewheeling “democracy” that Filipinos were made to believe they had “won” following the 1986 “revolution”.

Note all the words in quotes. Whilst there is an abundance of notions of goodness in these words, it is quite evident in hindsight that the proponents of these notions did not know what they were getting their country into. The stark reality they confront today under the government of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is that everything they gnash their teeth about is a product of their Yellowtard Constitution.

Forget for a moment that this oligarch-crafted constitution set the Philippines up to be a barrel of fat fish that a tiny handful of rich folk fish off. That’s a different atrocity for discussion on a different occassion. The bigger issue with the Yellowtard “activism” in the early 1980s that culminated in their sacred 1987 Constitution is that it asked a two-year-old kid shivering in an unheated house in the middle of winter what he wanted the most — then handed him a flamethrower.

Yellowtards now insist that the Philippines is burning. Perhaps they should examine what it is exactly they gave the Filipino people back in 1987.

Was “freedom” really what Filipinos wanted back in 1986? For that matter, were Filipinos really in that bad a situation before 1986? The debate around the answers to those questions had been rekindled thanks to the disastrous Second Aquino Administration of 2010 to 2016. That debate and the confronting conclusions drawn from it was what paved the way for the ascent to power of President Duterte and the hideous permanent burial of Mar Roxas’s political career in the 2016 elections.

Still, the Yellowtards had not learnt the important lessons from all this. They continue to cling on to a pathetic tradition of necropolitics and still use their now-blunted emotional hooks as foundations for their political rhetoric. In this most recent activist fail, they used Kian delos Santos as a single pillar to hold up the house of cards that was their demonisation campaign against Duterte. This single point of failure was easily yanked from underneath them by a simple social grace extended by the president to Kian’s parents yesterday — a social grace that former President Benigno Simeon ‘BS’ Aquino III repeatedly failed to exhibit in the face of tragedy over his six-year term.

The big lesson here is that the Yellowtards were wrong about what Filipinos wanted back in 1987. They did not want a blowtorch as a source of warmth. They wanted a human touch in their government.

Though I wrote about how I once found disturbing the way Duterte’s “die hard” supporters referred to the president as “Daddy Digong”, I realise that therein that preferred term of endearment for a national leader lies the key to understanding what Filipinos expect of their leaders. Filipinos are still, in essence, that shivering two-year-old in an unheated house in the middle of winter.