Democratic fatigue

As he was being brought to the hospital after an assassination attempt, former vice president Emmanuel Pelaez asked Gen Tomas Karingal, the chief of the Quezon City Police, "What is happening to our country, General?

- BOO CHANCO

That was back in 1982. What was happening to our country at the time was the Marcos dictatorship getting tiresome. A year later, the Marcos regime started to unravel.

Ninoy Aquino was assassinated and who had good reasons to want to see him dead? Our people gave Ninoy the longest, best attended and most heartfelt funeral that took the whole day.

Soon, our Central Bank was found to have cooked the books by claiming more dollars in our account than we had. Cesar Virata, the Marcos technocrat who was prime minister, had to bravely tell Mr. Marcos to ask his cronies to bring back a few hundred million dollars so we can pay our creditors and avoid a formal default.

Between 1983 and 1986, the Filipino people quietly seethed in anger, organized boycotts of products of Marcos crony companies, shredded the yellow pages of phone books to fill Ayala Avenue with a rain of yellow strips of paper from the top floors of buildings to show unity against the dictatorship.

Those were bad times. We lived through those times. And we not only survived but came out of it proud to be Filipinos. We forced a dictator and his family fleeing to exile in Hawaii. Democracy triumphed.

Our problem today is not having a single villain as a unifying focus. Our problem today is essentially us, for allowing our democratic system to deteriorate as badly as it had. Our elections are killing democracy, or its essence.

The shocking revelations about trillions of taxpayer money lost to senior political leaders and their conspirators have caused a stir in the public conscience. But not enough. Not like it was in the 80s.