GMA, Pnoy and the Street Boys

"What does profit a (wo)man if (s)he gains the whole world and loses her/his own soul?" 

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

The first quote is from the Sacred Book of the Christians while the second are words of wisdom from the Spanish philosopher George Santayana. These quotes are old but they have become more relevant today in the light of current events in the Philippines, specifically the filing of charges against the former President Gloria Arroyo (GMA)  and her subsequent arrest.

I am not going to discuss the legal technicalities involved here. I leave that to the experts.

My concern is the obvious lack of a sense of history on the part of many politicians and the lack of political maturity of the majority of Filipinos. Nobody is accusing GMA of stupidity. She has pedigree being a former president's daughter. She has a PhD diploma from the premier state university (UP) and a former classmate of US president George Bush. She became a professor of Economics, appointed as undersecretary of DTI, elected twice as senator and topped her second election, and finally elected as vice-president and eventually became president for ten long years. She is by all measures a brilliant woman married to a scion of a rich and landed family.

With all these accomplishments, where is she now? She is now a  pitiful, sick, and incarcerated person with no one to publicly express support for her except family and loyal employees. How much power and money can one have to be satisfied?

Could it be that she became what she is today to serve as a bad example? That we Filipinos never learn? This is something I would like to explore.

To be practical, she was arrested because the present president (PNoy) made it his priority to make everyone accountable. While his actions seemed to look admirable, not a few people suspect that he is doing all these more out  of revenge than  of a sense of justice.  Pa-pogi point is a local term for this, knowing fully well that GMA is very unpopular.

 Be that as it may, won't PNoy realize that he is in office for more than 500 days with very little accomplishment so far? What happen to his Public Private Partnership program? Until now not a single project under PPP was implemented. What about the CASH OUT program? Recently, newspapers brandish results of surveys showing more and more Filipinos going hungry. What about the misused COCO LEVY FUND? Can't PNoy do a passionate crusade to give justice to millions of coconut farmers who were deprived of their hard earned money? What about the victims of the Hacienda Luisita Massacre? Oh never mind all of these, PNoy still gets the highest approval rating in history, his supporters seem to say. It's politics as usual.

Dear fellow Filipinos, when can we learn from history? What lesson did we get from our experiences under the Spaniards, Americans, Japanese? What about lessons from Marcos? Erap?

Kailan magkakaroon ng bahay, pagkain at edukasyon ang mga kababayan kong Street Boys na nasa litrato?