Looking back to the things I said last Friday night, I feel good!
All our lives we are told not to belt out our feelings freely in public. We are told to curse quietly, privately, within the cloister of family or friends. To blurt out anger, or rage, or grief before a crowd, is taboo.
I say that depends a lot on the situation, especially when we look at what is happening in our country today.
We all live in a rotten prison.
Filipinos are selling their kidneys online! Leftovers from the fast food kitchens are Christmas fare for the hungry! Hundreds of thousands of Filipinos are taking care of elder persons abroad to earn money to buy expensive medicines for their own elders in the Philippines!
People are denying their values for survival. Fathers drown their humiliation in drink knowing their daughters are prostitutes; mothers keep quiet knowing their sons are thieves—just so they can all meet in their hovel to have one meal together.
On top of all these, activists and journalists are being killed with impunity.
And we all know that one of the biggest reasons why the people are so destitute, so emaciated in body and spirit, is the insidious, relentless and organized corruption in a government that has imprisoned us in shame.
So what can we expect the people to act when those in power attempt to perpetuate themselves in office through the Gloria Forever Constitution and seal the final lock in our prison?
This administration has already stolen a lot from our people. It is now attempting to steal our last thread of hope–not only our Constitution, but the great ideals of Filipino democracy and freedom.
Those ideals are our only means to break free from the prison of hunger, want, disease and injustice.
But this is not about Government alone, this is also about all of us. When we ourselves reduce everything to power and money, deny the squalor around us, or think we can fence out the unwashed and stifle voices that do not agree with us— we lose not only a huge part of our humanity, but our entire nationhood. We perpetuate our own imprisonment in the past.
Let us break free from the darkness, and fight for truth and right!
– By Senator Mar Roxas
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