The Philippine Opposition: A community of people incapable of reflection continue to deal with their post-traumatic stress

It’s not easy to see that the Philippine Opposition is effectively non-existent today. It suffered catastrophic losses over two national elections and was utterly buried in the third and most recent one last year. These losses were all a result of their top “thought leaders” doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results on each occasion — a sure sign of absolute derangement.

Philippine Star columnist Alex Magno summed it up in his column published in May last year as it became evident that the Opposition were utterly crushed…

During the long political campaign, the opposition tried to sell the specter of the past resurrecting to haunt us. That was non sequitur. The mass of our voters, in their immense wisdom, saw through the charade the opposition was trying to peddle and voted against them. BBM won by the most massive landslide we ever saw.

The opposition propagandists threw their shadow on the wall and were terrified by it.

He then added an interesting anecdote…

Last week, my doctor reported to me he recommended several patients (all Leni [Robredo] supporters) to seek professional help for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I asked him what the symptoms of that disorder might be. Extreme anxiety, he said.

So, first, the Opposition mounted campaigns inspired by the products of their insanity from 2016 to 2022. Then they fall into a deep anxiety induced by the post-trauma stress they suffered following their loss in a seminal election. What next?

It seems all this had created a dangerous bunch of people. This is evident in what we see today — stragglers whose approach to coming to terms with their loss comes in the form of denying said loss. Rather than pick up the pieces, they scrounge around for scapegoats, lash out at strawmen, and turn blind eyes to information that offer factual answers to their questions. To these deranged people, their loss was not a result of playing well but more an outcome of “evil” people depriving them of a win they believe they are entitled to.

This is the sort of thinking that creates extremists, terrorists, and, ultimately, homicidal maniacs. Perhaps then, someone like Faith Nester Poltic, a nurse employed by the Baguio General Hospital and Medical Center who allegedly issued a call to her fellow nurses to kill former First Lady Imelda Marcos, is an embodiment of the crisis we all knew was coming on the back of the mass trauma of the Philippine Opposition.

Filipinos need a smart and modern Opposition and not the intellectually-bankrupt zealots they are subject to today. What might possibly replace these political cockroaches? Evidently, we now know this is an extremely difficult question to answer — because we have seen how even three consecutive electoral losses still fail to induce long-overdue reflection among the most eminent of Opposition “thought leaders”. It takes, after all, informed minds to imagine a new character to build following traumatic setbacks. Perhaps if the Opposition learn to be strong and stop being such whiners, there may still be hope of a much-needed evolution in their thinking.