Jay Lagare

Just when the economy was riding higher and you get another coup scare. Both the peso and the markets fell sharply upon the rumors of a coup and the subsequent declaration of martial law state of national emergency. Luckily when things sort of stabilized, both also recovered sharply.

Sometimes you wonder if someone is playing around with the government for market manipulation and profiteering purposes. You probably only need to spend just a little to shake up the fragile government a bit. But for sure, such unpredictability cannot be good for the economy in general.

Maybe what we should do is bulldoze down the EDSA Shrine and the People’s Power Monument. Maybe that will make people forget about EDSA 1 (and 2 and 3) and prevent people from exploiting it to promote instability. At the very least that should get rid of the horrible traffic whenever the EDSA 1 anniversary comes around. I mean, what’s been done’s been done. And when you think about it did things really really change?

The no-longer-so-recent brouhaha over some cartoons shows no sign of letting up. If anything, it is spreading. What started off as an event that was pretty insignificant was used by rabble rousers to foment unrest.

In Libya, the police cracked down on the rowdy mob who burned down the Italian consulate, killing several. But the police was later disciplined for engaging in acts “beyond the the duties of the police”. Uh what is the duty of the police? It’s not the police who needed disciplining, it’s the mob!

In Nigeria, mobs burned churches and beating up people, often to death. I wonder, will we be seeing protests from the rest of the world because of these burnings and beatings? Somehow I don’t think so. The rest of the world is just too polite, civilized, and tolerant for burnings, beatings, heck even ethnocide.

All this unrest only brings wider attention to the issue which is taken as an opportunity by more rabble rousers to forment even more unrest. And the vicious cycle goes on. Pretty soon, the original issue would be forgotten and what will be left will be the animosity, a fuse to a bomb just waiting to be lit. And guess who will be lighting it? Definitely not the polite, civilized, and tolerant.