A day of reckoning: Can we expect the truth from Duterte’s Sona?

In the simplest terms, the President’s State of the Nation Address (Sona) is a rendering of accounts, a listing of achievements as well as failures. In old Tagalog, the term is “pagtutuos,” which in English is rendered best by the word “reckoning.”

July 22, a Monday, is meant to be a day of reckoning. Every Filipino, every citizen of this country has every right to expect a true reckoning by the leader of the land. And as all accountants know, the figures must tally. They must be true if the report is to have any meaning. An honest Sona will not allow for either undervaluation or exaggeration, not even hyperbole, since a true accounting is no joking matter. Distortions and lies would devalue the address.

But can we expect the truth from someone whose election to the presidency rests on empty promises, brazen lies and the use of gutter language supposedly to identify himself with the masses in order to win their votes?

He was candid when declaring his very personal war on drugs, and was to the point that there could be no war without killings. Sure enough, there have been plenty of dead bodies. Mostly of victims — small-time drug peddlers and those who got in the way of the bullet’s trajectory, courtesy of trigger-happy police officers.

They are tagged dismissively as “collateral damage,” because “shit happens”! But the drug lords and big-time traffickers are still very much around and doing brisk business.

The name Duterte is fast becoming synonymous with distortion. He just might make it to the Oxford dictionary before his term ends in 2022.

Joyce Bernal, a movie director known for her romantic comedies, is in the wrong place. There is nothing comedic about what’s happening to the country. Tragic is what’s going on. Yet she will give distortion another try after her failure last year to masquerade the real state of Philippine politics. (Remember how Gloria Macapagal Arroyo grabbed center stage and displaced Pantaleon Alvarez?).

This time she wants a celebratory atmosphere for her fictionalized version of the sad and sorry state of the country.  She says she’s doing it for free, and she’s probably doing it with the best of intentions. She must have overlooked that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

All things considered, we have to raise the question: What is there to celebrate? There’s no hiding the tears. There’s so much blood. Too many mothers are crying to heaven for rain to resurrect their dead sons.

For the country and for all of us to move forward as a people, we must realize that national transformation begins, not with lies and distortions, but with truth and reality.

Two actually contradicting slogans used ad nauseam by the regime give us an accurate depiction of the reality: Build, build, build! Kill, kill, kill!

But who’s going to pay the bill? And who are burying the dead?

FR. WILFREDO T. DULAY, MDJ

Convener, Religious Discernment Group,

[email protected]