A call to arms

A classic movie scene of an epic good-vs.-evil  battle involves a gladiator fighting bad-ass enemies in the middle of a jam-packed coliseum.  This cinematic spectacle serves as an allegorical depiction of the scenario that plays out in real life involving our leaders, our society’s  enemies and ourselves. However, the movie scene, no matter how visually gory, is a tame caricature of the inhumanity of our reality.

In our reality, we are a 100-million crowd in a coliseum-country. By casting our ballots we cast a spell upon our leaders to act as our gladiators. The enemies are corruption purveyors who literally and figuratively snuff out the lives of large swaths of our multitude.  Even with an understated fraction, the  number  of those who nibble and chomp at the national treasury from the ranks of our million  government  functionaries—lawmakers, governors, mayors,  judges, generals, petty bureaucrats—will overwhelm even a movie-scripted gladiator. Add to that the ranks  of businessmen who will employ  the foulest  means to corner public contracts. Then enter  the throng of relatives, friends, friends of relatives, and friends of friends who will solicit graft-entreaties.

The character difference between the reel and our real gladiators is wide, but that has been beaten dry in yesterday’s news. What needs to be mangled and beaten before our eyes is our attitude as a coliseum crowd toward our gladiator-leaders  and our society’s enemies.

By merely casting our ballots, we demand a  birthright entitlement to passively watch our real-life gladiators perform these superhuman feats: They will happily embrace subsistence salaries that confine them to frugal lives; they will rebuke and condemn all enemies, with absolutely no exception even for graft-mongering friends and relatives; and they will repulse all temptations of self-enrichment. We expect  our  gladiators to be the purest of saints and the  bravest of warriors.

We must snap out of our cinematic illusion that in our real lives, we can passively expect a happy ending  to naturally unfold like the sunrise. One gritty lesson earned from our storied past is the need for us to come down from the bleachers to fight with or against our gladiator-leaders. We must rumble down from the bleachers when either the enemies are too overwhelming for a benevolent leader  to fight alone, or our abundant numbers are required to confront or defy a malevolent leader.

Our poor remain in unacceptable numbers because we have an alternating succession of self-enriching  leaders on one hand, and acclaimed leaders whose acts of benevolence are tilted in favor of, or hijacked by, political and economic dynasties on the other hand. (We are rightly vigilant against the former, but have been wrongly oblivious of the latter.)

We are afflicted with a succession of these leaders because we remain in the bleachers  and  fail to respond to the literal call to arms. In  the language of our reality, we fail to heckle loud enough, raise our fists high enough, and  produce street-protesting bodies in fearsome numbers  that would  instill fright and shame and leave resignation as the only choice for wicked leaders in our midst. We had the two Edsas, but that’s two out of a  thousand indignities that should have prompted us to jump out of the bleachers.

The difference between our society and other societies whose leaders readily resign in shame is not in the kind of  leaders we respectively have, but in their kind of citizenry whose active and  persistent political activism has created  a culture where  shamed leaders have no choice but to resign. We have allowed the emergence of a  culture  that lets our leaders get away with crime. The  next  time  we complain of corrupt leaders  thriving  and multiplying in our midst,  think of them as our walking karma for our woeful habit of sitting in the bleachers and mumbling curses audible only to ourselves.

We have  been blaming corruption on our kind of  elected leaders,  so our solution has been to look and wait for a fictional  warrior-saint to drop from heaven. If instead we view the problem of corruption as the result of our  failure to  shout and protest enough at every instance of corruption, we can be on the right path of finding the solution in ourselves.

Our  vigorous political activism  will be  our  most crucial  and effective contribution to  the economic  uplift in the lives of our  poor. Our activism will plug the gaping holes of corruption in our national treasury, allowing chunks of our yearly  replenished resources to be  channeled to making  real improvements in the lives of our poor, with honest programs in livelihood and education.

We in the nonpoor class must carry the heavier burden of sustained and persistent activism. “With wealth and privilege comes great  responsibility,” to paraphrase a real-life superhero, the “Spiderman” scriptwriter. If that fails to convince us, and we  are tempted to still demand an equal burden for the poor, let’s all have a lesson in empathy: Skip lunch and then at four o’ clock in the afternoon, start screaming  “Graft and corruption!” with conviction.

Joel Ruiz Butuyan appears in various municipal courts and has orally argued in the Supreme Court. He has summited on Mount Apo and has night-dived in Tubbataha.