Trillion Peso March: Rising flood of people, not ghosts, but real

‘o, what is unfolding day after day toward the Sept. 21 Martsa ng Bayan (March of the Nation) is not, to borrow Shakespeare’s words, “a walking shadow... a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.”

- DIWA C. GUINIGUNDO

Neither is it “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

What the nation is seeing take shape is no mere spectacle, no passing fit of political theater. It is the gathering response of a people who, for too long, have been robbed blind and treated as if their outrage were irrelevant. The coming march is not an empty exercise — it is a reckoning, perhaps even a turning point, against the monstrous floodcontrol scandal that has already siphoned away at least a trillion pesos from the Filipino people.

This is not just theft — it is theft weaponized against our future. A trillion pesos gone is a trillion pesos not spent to cure the sick, educate our children, or strengthen our communities. It is a trillion pesos transformed into the cement of corruption, poured over our hospitals, our schools, our moral fiber, suffocating hope.

The Trillion Peso March is the people's answer to a reign of greed so brazen, so unrepentant, that one meme captures it perfectly: “sinindikato ang buong gobyerno.” The government itself has been made a syndicate — operating not as a guardian of the common good, but as a criminal enterprise.

FINGER POINTING AND CONNECTING THE DOTS

When former Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) Secretary Rogelio Singson said bluntly, “Lahat sila involved (all of them are involved),” he was not indulging in exaggeration. He was naming what has long been obvious: that the rot runs not only through contractors but through legislators, senators, and members of the executive branch itself.

The finger-pointing has begun, and in that desperate exercise, the lines connecting one corrupt hand to another have only become clearer.