Salus populi suprema lex esto

The welfare of the people is the highest law

In the final analysis, this is for me the only axiom about law that makes sense. John Locke used the phrase in his Second Treatise (On Civil Government) to describe the proper organization of government, quoting Marcus Tullius Cicero’s “De Legibus”. So what happens when the welfare of the people is not held in the highest consideration?

You have Philippine politics, as we know it.

Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish.
– Anne Bradstreet

GMA has lost her moral right to rule because she has lost sight of what it means to be a President, to be a leader. One would even think she never had such vision in the first place.

That there are no good alternatives, I’ll freely admit – de Castro scares me as much as de Venecia does. That the bishops, once led by the late Jaime Cardinal Sin, would turn away from their once proud tradition as guardians of morality by refusing to see the truth about GMA’s illegitimacy, I’ll acknowledge. But the people are not blind. The people are not apathetic. And I know the people will not stand for this much longer.

We are the blogger generation. We are the SMS babies. The tools of global mass-communication are our willing servants. Marcos succeeded only because too many people didn’t know or were misinformed, and by the time they understood, it was too late. “I was right about Marcos,” Benigno Ninoy Aquino cried out bitterly in jail, “but I was wrong about the rest of the Filipinos.”¹ “There is only one thing worse than GMA ruling by fiat,” Inquirer columnist Conrado de Quiros would echo, ” [and] that is a people not caring that she does.”²

Both men’s opinions I regard highly. But in this instance, both men are wrong. The Filipino is still worth dying for, and I refuse to learn to live with new levels of intolerance.

If GMA persists in her tyrannical ways, true People Power is not a question of “ifs”. It is a question of “when”.