Less than a year ago, Jess Paredes, Adrian Sison and myself were going around the country essentially telling everyone that we volunteered for a suicide mission precisely because we needed to have the right to say “we told you so”. There are so many Filipinos who can contribute much to our country but who have their personal reasons why they choose to stay out of the fight. These are the same Filipinos who are now counting upon their religious leaders, officers of the armed forces and ironically, their elected traditional politicians to deliver themselves from the dishonest dispensation of Gloria Arroyo. What can be more naïve? It’s certainly more of a stretch than my dream of a Raul Gonzalez conversion (for some reason, looking back on better days, I haven’t lost hope in this).

To those of you who voted for the “opposition”, did you really expect them to disrupt their preferred positions in the political food chain? And to those administration loyalists, were you seriously expecting the likes of Senators Joker and Zubiri to fight for the education and healthcare and ultimately for the lives of the millions of poor children at the expense of their personal friendship with Gloria and Mike?

We are all schmucks, we are all underlings if this had been our collective delusion. And I am not sour-graping, that millions more would have supported us three to give real change a chance because I myself had to rush back to the US after the elections in order to make a living for my children. I realize we all need to protect our own little interests and it is to the desperately hungry and the chronically ill and the truly poor and dispossessed people to rise and right this disastrously unfair, unjust, and abysmally anti-life system that is killing them.

And here is where the gastroenterologist makes his diagnosis: because we do not have sufficient love for these, the very least of our brethren who consistently sell their votes and behave like wild beasts concerned only about their day to day survival. I am doing good, my kids are going to good schools and they are well within the normal curve of the growth charts, my responsibilities are met and I sleep well every night.

We have seen the enemy.