It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
The year began benignly enough, looking to controvert the reputation of “13” as an unlucky number. In February, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo herself changed her tune and grudgingly gave P-Noy high marks for economic performance. Since the latter half of 2012, the country had been posting record rates of growth.
Which only got better as the months rolled by. By June the Philippines was being touted by international economic bodies as the “new miracle of Asia.” We had recorded a 7.8-percent growth rate during its first quarter, which had gone past even China, which had “only” 7.7 percent. Not bad, given what we had just been, which was the sick man of Asia, and where much of the world remained at, which was in the pit of a recession.
February brought an augury of dire things to come. In an act of madness, Jamalul Kiram III sent a band of renegades to Sabah to try to reclaim an ancient, forgotten, and universally unrecognized right to a perceived dominion. Of course they were repelled—the outcome was never in doubt—not just by the Malaysian government but by the people they proposed to liberate. The repulsion, like the incursion, proved bloody, which included among its victims not just the invaders but many of the Tausug in Sabah who suffered reprisals afterward.
The siege, or farce, ended a couple of weeks later. Kiram himself disappeared from view and, toward the end of the year, from this earth, a tiny footnote to history.
The cruel month of August brought cruel signs of tribulation. Following on the heels of P-Noy’s triumphant State of the Nation
Address, Janet Napoles burst into the scene, courtesy of the Inquirer, reminding the country that the fight against corruption had barely begun, the Titanic of corruption had barely been sunk. Overnight Napoles became the face of corruption and pork its emblem.
Napoles’ doings straddled pretty much a past period—she is suspected of accumulating P10 billion over roughly the same number of years, which meant for the most part Arroyo’s time. On the basis of the Commission on Audit’s findings, the administration tagged several congressmen and Senators Jinggoy Estrada and Bong Revilla as parties to the crime. The administration was riding high, it had a record rate of growth behind it, and had served notice the crooked would be found, the thieving would be punished. The “daang matuwid” was working.
Then suddenly, everything unraveled.
Jinggoy delivered a privilege speech whose point was not that he was innocent but that others were just as guilty as he. P-Noy himself, he suggested, had bought off—he refused to use the word “bribe”—the senators who voted to oust Renato Corona. Completely inexplicably, the administration didn’t find in this a reason to pounce on Jinggoy, it found in this a reason to defend itself. It denied trying to influence the outcome of Corona’s trial. Butch Abad came out to say the money given to the cooperative senators wasn’t a bribe but funds from the DAP, a program to accelerate development. All it did was draw public attention, and ire, to the DAP. It became the presidential version of pork.
Thus began the Great Reversal. The public, which had gotten outraged over the legislators’ use of hard-earned taxpayer money to light their cigars with, started blasting the administration as well. First for being powerless to stop pork, then for being tolerant of pork, and finally for actively promoting pork. Right or wrong, the attacks began to take their toll.
P-Noy rallied a bit in Zamboanga and Bohol, in the first responding decisively to Nur Misuari’s siege of the city and in the second pitching tent in the ruins of Tagbilaran to show solidarity with the earthquake survivors. But not enough to arrest the slide. With no small help from the spinners, social media and the public itself let loose their wrath upon the administration. Before “Yolanda” came, the winds of a vicious storm were swirling around the administration, pounding it again and again with powerful surges of Learian rant.
Then came Yolanda.
It battered not just Tacloban, it also battered Malacañang. This time with no small help from CNN, which was first to report government paralysis in the face of the devastation. Things didn’t get better with Typhoon Mar, P-Noy’s favorite sidekick, who reminded his countrymen why nothing moved, and has moved, in DOTC and DILG during his watch. He showed in a grimy video how he dealt grimily with perceived subordinates.
The scale of devastation from Yolanda was awe-inspiring, which brought out the worst and best in Filipinos. The worst was the vultures that came out immediately after the storm, looting and terrorizing, and the carpetbaggers that tried to make a fast buck off a prostrate land. The best was the phenomenal outpouring of generosity and goodwill from within and without, from Filipinos here and abroad, and indeed from the world itself, a tsunami of giving, of relief goods and of one’s self, that swept across Leyte and neighboring provinces. It soon became bigger than the storm surges that broke onto their shores earlier. The deluge of goodwill persists to this day, a month after Yolanda, well into Christmas and probably after, as a nation, or a world, discovers its conscience, its mortality, its humanity.
Maybe it was Christmas, maybe it was a reaction to the reaction, maybe it was people rediscovering perspective, but before the year was out,
P-Noy defied critics and detractors by holding on to his approval ratings. Not surging like a storm surge but not ebbing like ebb tide either. Certainly not plunging into the abyss of negative figures his detractors had predicted or prayed for. His administration has lived to fight another day, offering a shaft of hope, a glimmer of promise.
That was the year that was, the best of times, the worst of times.