De Lima’s 525,600 minutes

How long is a year? As the song from “Rent” goes, it’s “five hundred twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes.”

In the life of a child, one year — especially the first year — passes in the blink of an eye, going from helpless infant to restless toddler to bratty hellion in swift and shocking succession.

In a happy marriage, spouses wake up one day to realize they had been together for almost four decades, going on five, feeling like the day they had just met. For those trapped in sad, stifling relationships, a year crawls by with daily trials and heartbreaking confrontations. And in prison, the days and the years flow into a monotonous stream, while the hours in a day trickle slowly in increments of indignity and despair.

What has the past year been like for Sen. Leila de Lima? In the next few days, the country — or at least those who remember and care for her — will observe one year since her arrest and detention. It has been a year which she, held in solo confinement, must have spent in loneliness and creeping despair, cut off from regular contact with her family and her wide network of supporters.

And yet, despite her jailors’ efforts, the senator maintains a link with the world outside. She regularly issues handwritten notes, commentaries and statements — evidence that not only does she keep a keen eye on current events, she also remains in the thick of it.

Until recently, too, she was allowed a limited number of visitors who must have given her updates on events in the political realm. But lately, even these regular visits have been stifled. Visitors have to wait for more than a week before their application to see the senator is approved. They are made to wait for many minutes before being allowed in, while the senator is transferred from her quarters to a nearby compound where doubtless their every word and move are recorded. Not even P-Noy has been spared the scrutiny and inconvenience.

Doubtless part of the reason for keeping De Lima and her friends on a tight leash is the desire of her jailors — or those behind her jailors and who orchestrated the events leading to her detention — to break her.

There is their hope, too, that the Filipino people will forget that a senator, who won enough votes to earn her a seat in the Senate, remains behind bars without benefit of trial. And sometimes, it does seem that way. Over time, they hope that Leila de Lima will not only fade into insignificance, having been silenced and virtually erased from the public eye, but also turn into a ghost haunting the public memory. A ghost disappearing into the mist of forgetfulness.

Of course, this is not the first time that a president has used his or her powers to make an annoying political pest “disappear.” Former president (and now influential congresswoman) Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo spent much of the P-Noy years under hospital arrest on graft charges. This, following that comical scene at the airport where she tried to scoot out of the country in a wheelchair and wearing a neck brace. Come to think of it, De Lima played a prominent part in that scenario, too.

But just because it’s been done before does not excuse its repeat, especially on such flimsy, foul charges as those hurled against the senator. A rule of the playground comes into play here: What goes around comes around.

Which reminds us. Is it in pursuit of the law (such as the drug trafficking charges against De Lima) that the Duterte gods are searching frantically for a case to build up against P-Noy and his close advisers?

I wonder, for instance, why the hysteria over the Dengvaxia scare is being whipped up with a House and Senate inquiry, no less. The Department of Health, the vaccine manufacturer Sanofi Pasteur, and belatedly, the World Health Organization, have all issued the assurance that the vaccine falls within international guidelines of risk assessment. And yet members of Congress, along with a cast of bad actors and clowns, insist on casting aspersions on those who approved the vaccine purchase. The hounds smell their prey close by, and the hunters are salivating.