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Politics was never a four-letter word in our family. I was raised by parents who exposed me to their political leanings and philosophies, and encouraged me to participate in political debate.
My family stood by my five-year-old self in April 1978, when we all stood outside the gate of my grandparents' house with pots and pans, horns, and those wooden machine guns that with a rotating handle you wound to go rat-tat-tat. It was a noise barrage to protest the Marcos government and martial law, and my family told me to make noise, to be as loud as I could, and to scream at the top of my lungs. As far back as I can remember, my family encouraged me to let our political leaders know how I felt about their governance.
Freedom of speech wasn’t just an expression in our household. It was a rule. Our family occasionally engaged in heated debates around the dinner table that, to an outsider, could seem as though we hated each other’s guts. But my parents had trained me and my siblings to speak our minds and, for the most part, to take nothing personally. After dinner, after raising our voices and shaking our heads or sometimes our fists In the air, everything would go back to normal. We’d get dessert, play some board games, and get back to our inside jokes as if nothing happened. Politics had always been welcome discussion at home.
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Freedom of speech wasn’t just an expression in our household. It was a rule.
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Everything changed in 2016. We didn’t always support the same candidates. As free-thinkers, our parents encouraged us to figure out for ourselves who we felt was best and rarely tried to sway us in our political affiliations. One thing we could all agree on at the time, however, was that then incumbent President Aquino hadn’t done such a terrific job and we all couldn’t wait to be rid of him. But the 2016 presidential slate seemed devoid of any real alternative. Between one mayor plagued with allegations of corruption, a popular neophyte, and a candidate weighed down with all the sins of his party, the other option—a tough-talking mayor with a hardline stance against drugs and corruption—didn’t seem like such a bad choice.
To me, even then, there were red flags: between the whispers of death squads and the promises to kill drug users, the prospect was alarming, not encouraging. But it was exactly those declarations of hate against drugs and corruption that convinced my mother.
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Understand that it was my mother who taught me to stand up for what’s right. She was a fiery, impassioned woman who took to the streets in 1986 to oust Ferdinand Marcos. Once, at a gridlocked intersection, my mother stepped out of the car and forced her will upon unyielding drivers and managed to untangle an impossible mess. At a queue for taxis in SM North Edsa, she stood in front of a cab that took on a passenger who cut the line. When I saw her stand in front of a car, refusing to budge, I learned then how important it was to do the right thing. Watching my mother as I grew up inspired me to always do the right thing. In choosing her president, she believes she is doing the right thing.
This is painful for me to comprehend, because to me, it seemed clear that this reasoning was deeply flawed. After her candidate won and his vaunted War on Drugs began, my mother expended much effort to try and get my brother, who was once a drug user, to migrate to New Zealand. She was afraid of what might happen to him.
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Picture that for a moment. My mother knew, or believed, that the government was killing users and pushers—and she was okay with that. As long as it wasn’t her son in the crosshairs. The cognitive dissonance, if not the hypocrisy, stunned me. We tried to point this out to her, but she would have none of it. Her focus was on what she believed was the greater good. Our arguments would escalate but never get resolved. There would be mo more discussions about politics after that.
For the first time, politics was no longer a welcome subject at our dinner table.
In my view, I couldn’t in good conscience support a man who constantly lies, exhibits and encourages misogyny, boasts about and condones murder, and demonstrably favors another country over his own.
In my mother's mind, it was all strategy: Duterte is, in her words, "wily." She believes he is operating on a level completely beyond the understanding of ordinary people. To me, it seems like a rationalization of bad choices.
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Our arguments would escalate but never get resolved. There would be mo more discussions about politics after that.
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Perhaps part of the trouble is that, for the first time, it was impossible to talk about a politician without also talking about personal philosophies, about values. Discussions regarding politics went beyond heated yet civil debates over dinner and veered dangerously close to creating resentment.
I am so philosophically opposed to what Duterte embodies that my mother’s support of him shook me to my core. We no longer discuss politics in person, but I would still get into a flurry of exchanges on Facebook with my mother, and to a lesser degree my sister. It became so toxic to me that I eventually unfollowed my own mother on social media.
It was difficult for me to grasp how she could reconcile Duterte’s support for the Marcoses while having been part of the EDSA revolution. She had friends who disappeared and friends who were detained during Martial Law. But here she was able to compartmentalize his support for the Marcoses and her opposition to them. Furthermore, my mother and sister also distanced Bongbong Marcos from his father, saying things like: they weren’t the same person, and the sins of the father shouldn’t be passed on to the son.
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It was maddening how my mother could turn a blind eye to the spate of killings in the drug war, going so far as to believe that it’s justified. In fact, she didn’t deny that the state was killing drug users; she seemed okay with that. In fact, during one bizarre argument, she likened Duterte’s purge to the massacre at Tiananmen Square, saying that viewed from the rearview mirror, China was right. She believed that the ends justified the means.
It was world-shattering for me to hear my mother, the woman whom I’d held in such high esteem, the woman who inspired me to be passionate and not stand idly by, talk about state-perpetrated killing as not only acceptable, but even necessary. It made no sense. It was heartbreaking. After being frustrated by her stance during one argument on Facebook, I wrote how I no longer recognized my own mother. Her response floored me: She said that she hadn’t changed, and that perhaps I never really knew her to begin with.
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I know my mother, though. I know she is kind-hearted and intelligent. I know she loves her family, my children, her grandchildren. She’s a terrific cook, a kind employer, and a supportive partner to my dad. I know many things about her, the woman who taught me many things. I am the way I am because of my mother. Imagine how I felt to hear her tell me that I probably didn’t know her as well as I thought I did. That maybe I’d gotten the wrong idea about her. It feels like having the rug pulled out from under your feet.
After being frustrated by her stance during one argument on Facebook, I wrote how I no longer recognized my own mother.
Fortunately, my interactions with my family are minimal these days. I have my own family now, as do most of my other siblings. We see each other only on holidays and special occasions. On those days we no longer talk about politics. It’s no longer an enjoyable subject. Whereas we all used to share the same opinions on most politicians, cracking jokes about this mayor or that senator, griping about corruption or bad public policy, the current divide is something that has put politics outside our pool of acceptable table topics.
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It’s unfortunate because we’ve always felt that politics is an important discussion in any family, or at least it should be. In my family, we are civil when we’re face to face. My mom still cooks our favorite foods, she's still a fun and cool grandma. But something’s changed.
Perhaps we’ll weather this until this term is over. Perhaps after 2022, we’ll be able to unite against a common enemy once again. We all had our own candidates back in 2010, though we all agreed PNoy wasn’t getting our votes. Despite campaigning for different candidates, our discussions were still lively, spirited, and civil. It never got to the point where we questioned each other’s principles or ethics. The 2016 elections changed all that. Even when the man is gone, what it has revealed about our characters will leave some lingering questions for my family. Questions that may never be answered, and questions that I never wanted to ask.
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