YPS

My Facebook status today reads “Maxine Tanya is rightly where her advocate heart lies., in the State of the Indigenous Peoples Address. Whose nation, what nation do we all speak about?” If Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has a facebook account (does she?) it would have probably read” Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo will not step down after the SONA. She will keep a heavy…(pause) steady hand on the ship of state”.

The audience here is quiet at the State of the Indigenous Peoples' Address*. No moments of applause. Some moments of heavy sighs and a few outbursts of laughter. Teasing taunts as individuals were called and their accomplishments cited as if these were accomplishments of an administration so poorly rated. I wonder what thoughts run through the minds of my fellow indigenous peoples in the room.

My thoughts border on disbelief. This is a story tale I feel. It is a story being told to a gallery who badly need to hear it. Gloria Macapagal is hard, arrogant, throwing out insults against those who criticize her and extolling the path she has taken. There is a veneer of meanness in her speech and there is not a single indication that she hears or wants to hear otherwise. There is not an iota of wisdom to share, reflections to move a nation forward or reflection on what 9 years amounts to and what her final year should bring to a nation in need.

I would have thought the final SONA of a President who has served 9 years in office would have taken a note of leadership, of having learned something from those years in service. Of having faced the task of serving and leading the Filipino nation. The state of our nation is not a platform to preen and posture …unless there was never any intention to address the nation in the first place.

It is a story tale… told to those who need to hear it. Those who need to be assured that the storyline is the right one and everyone else is off cue.

I feel so far from the state of the nation as written in her story tale. If the reality I live in shows me weakened democracy, increasing poverty, a degraded environment, communities whose lives are threatened either by calamities, displacement or armed conflict (and I mean both sides of the armed conflict!!!) then I do not know of whose nation she speaks of.

Here in an audience of indigenous peoples, I fear the guarded silence that met her strong words on keeping a heavy hand (yes she said heavy before she changed it to steady) on the ship of state. I fear the months ahead where Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo boards up her walls against any attempt to talk of a nation that badly needs change. I fear the months ahead where communities whose aspirations for food security and peace are met by a strong republic whose definition of development does not have space for other options in mind. I fear for a generation who has just watched a person in a position of leadership wield power so arrogantly and self-righteously. I fear for a nation whose reality was not reflected nor acknowledged in what should have been a leader’s address to the nation.

It is a story tale… crisp, sharp, jarring and painful. It is naked power thrown at us. We weave our tales and history judges us by the lines we draw. The saddest yet most determined thought that settled in my mind after the applause died down was this…

We can’t wait for history this time… we don’t have that luxury anymore. The story needs an end, if we do not write our lines… we will leave it up to those who made up the deafening applause of a gallery of thieves….

*Live blog from the State of the Indigenous Peoples Address at the auditorium of the UP College of Social Work and Community Development.