A “celebrated” fortuneteller has just favored another media organization with his list of predictions for 2009, and one of the many political predictions is startling enough. The actress Vilma Santos, now governor of the province of Batangas, is sure to win the vice-presidency, the fortuneteller said. This is an outstanding prediction, in part because the elections won’t take place until 2010.

Who, in his right mind, would include an event in May 2010 on his list of predictions for 2009? Doesn’t this seer’s crystal ball come with a calendar?

Another thing: The same “psychic” predicted that Charter change would push through in 2009. Apparently, this is a different kind of Charter change from the one the Arroyo administration and its allies have in mind; it still allows elections for national office, including the vice-presidency which Santos is certain (of course) to win.

In truth, it is easy to make “predictions” about the future, if the predictions are couched in convenient, noncommittal language. It is when we require the seers and fortunetellers who crowd the pages and the newscasts to name specific events or specific persons in specific language that the “predictions” become problematic.

At this time last year, nobody could have predicted what turned out to be the biggest stories of 2008: the worst economic downturn in 70 years, the near-landslide election of a black first-term senator to the White House, and the return of Joc-joc Bolante and the revived public interest in the four-year-old fertilizer scam.

This is not to say that some astute observers had not read the signs correctly; there were economists who sensed something deeply wrong with the US economy; political operatives who placed their bets on Barack Obama to win big, even before Obama won the first primary in Iowa; lawyers who saw the imminence of Bolante’s deportation.

But the scope of the global economic turmoil, the scale of Obama’s victory, the insatiableness of the Filipino public’s hunger for the latest revelations about the P728-million fertilizer scam—in general these and similar events, even those relatively predictable incidents like Israel’s all-out assault on Hamas in the Gaza Strip or the inevitable politicization of the Olympic torch relay, caught the world by surprise.

Would anyone have predicted, in December 2007, that the largest street demonstration against the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo administration in 2008 would happen in February, as a protest against the ZTE-NBN scandal, instead of in December, as outrage boiled over against Charter change? Did anyone predict that the worst public-relations disaster to hit the Philippine National Police since terrorist bomber Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi slipped out of the Camp Crame general headquarters would strike in 2008, not over another inexplicable escape but because of over-generous allowances for police generals attending a conference in Russia?

If history teaches us anything, it is that the human capacity for folly, for immoderate greed, for self-defeating behavior is endless. Who could have predicted that, in the midst of the worst economic turmoil in three generations, would explode another financial scandal, the $50-billion Madoff scam? Who could have predicted that, under a president with real ties to Mindanao (President Arroyo spent part of her growing-up years in Iligan City), the administration would wreck this decade’s hopes for peace with Moro insurgents through an ill-conceived (not to mention unconstitutional) memorandum of agreement?

None of this is to say that we cannot extrapolate this year’s trends from last year’s events. We can and should expect the global economic slowdown to hurt Philippine business, both big and small; we can expect a general easing in commodity prices; we should expect the administration to try to prolong its grip on power.

But we must also be open to other possibilities. Who knows? The year 2009 may surprise us with great stories of entrepreneurial derring-do or heartwarming examples of profound civic engagement. Our capacity for transcending our limitations is similarly endless. That is why, as a wise man once said, it is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.