Filipinos suffering ‘effigy fatigue’ as traditional “activists” exhibit a profound imagination deficit in SONA 2023 antics

Anti-Marcos rhetoric. What else, right? It’s not as if we could expect anything more of the Philippines’ traditional “activists” who are beavering away over the weekend to prepare for the usual antics expected of them on the occasion of Monday’s State of the Nation Address (SONA).

It is interesting then that Yellowtard Inquirer columnist Gideon Lasco writes today a piece titled “Slogans over substance”…

…our government’s obsession with new logos and slogans is rooted in a desire to project a false sense of novelty and achievement, while actually masking old and problematic ways of thinking and doing.

Lasco may as well be describing his own people who have so far, over the last five decades, neither backed their slogans with substance nor shown tangible results having, to be fair, walked their proverbial talk with their countryside terrorism. Even then, the walk nowadays is anything but badass seeing that pink still colours much of leftist rhetoric — a holdover from the Opposition “led” by former “vice president” Leni Robredo that cost them the 2022 national elections.

Mere stunts won’t win back the nation the Yellowtard-Communist Axis lost over three consecutive election years. The traditional Opposition need to come up with compelling content to fill Filipinos’ timelines and ditch the old Martial Law Crybaby rhetoric that has made them a mere punchline in national politics. One of their own bloggers, Katrina Stuart-Santiago has long been calling out her people to take action and institute deep reforms in the way they think. In her most recent piece “(Middle Class) Crisis: Why rising from May 2022 has been difficult” she writes of their camps’ catastrophic losses…

When so many are (still!) in denial about the electoral outcomes, still insisting that we were cheated of an election, still insisting that surveys (even the most recent one!) spread disinformation. Because critical, difficult conversations are unwelcome, we have yet to process what went wrong (and what the other side did right) in 2022, and so many of us have just gone back to living our lives the way we do — by paddling along, surviving inflation, and for middle-class stuck-in-the-Philippines-us, just living off whatever self-care routines we can still afford.

Evidently, even Stuart-Santiago’s is a small voice in a community of screeching social climbers. That’s a shame, because Filipinos deserve a better Opposition — better than even the “new” one that is emerging in the ashes of this tired axis of dysfunctional liberalism that is said to be on one side of a “rift” forming within the “Unity Team”.