At first, I declined the invitation sent via my Facebook inbox—I wanted Wednesday (yesterday) devoted entirely to painting. The organizer understood and didn’t push me anymore.
A dear friend I see off and on (meaning, rarely and in short spurts) was attending, and she said I ought to go. The possibility that we can kick off our slippers and chat immediately after the official agenda of the meeting was taken up still wasn’t enough to persuade me.
But on Tuesday, Princess Nemenzo, activist for life, went on a texting brigade. That clinched it. I can never refuse this woman. I put the paints, brushes and pieces of canvas paper aside and prepared for the luncheon meeting at the home of lawyer Deng Cordero Tan.
Something electric happens when women get together. Literally, there’s more static in the air from all that energy (and these are women mostly in their 50s; Princess is 70—she has never hidden the fact). There’s more laughter, more irreverent humor that would make our partners and husbands jump out of their skin.
Deng detailed everything in her head to ensure everything was covered, including requesting the neighbors’ carpenters to kindly refrain from hammering from 12 noon to 2 p.m. while the meeting was going on.
Very briefly, Danny Lim is a political prisoner under the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo administration. In my head, he is simply Danny Lim because years of a spoiled, politicized military (no thanks to the Marcos dictatorship) have made me leery of men in uniform who have the impunity to run for public office like Butcher Palparan.
But political imprisonment in the Lim case is borne out of his belief in a just, civil, democratic society, not a longing for a banana republic where colonels and generals hold sway.
The idea that women of the caliber of Princess, Deng, Aida Santos, Mercy Fabros, June Rodriguez, Gou de Jesus, Susan Tagle, Marianita Villariba, Mari Santiago are keen on seeing Lim enter the Magic 12 in this year’s senatorial elections overturned my entire perception of what a military man is.
A personal note: My father Enrique CariƱo Lolarga Jr., a physician surgeon, and his younger brothers Ernesto or Esting, an ROTC instructor, and Celso, a businessman-school administrator, were in the reserve corps of the military. But they belonged to the era of officers and gentlemen. Before they died, my father and Uncle Esting left instructions that they be garbed in their Boy Scout uniforms in their coffins. Uncle Celso chose to be in his Demolay or Mason outfit.
My perception changed with martial law and the military adventurists who tried to destabilize the Cory Aquino government in the 1980s.
Just who is Danny Lim, and why is GMA afraid of him that in his detention cell at Camp Crame, he is not allowed to read newspapers or magazines? There’s a TV set there, according to the women who’ve visited him, and he is allowed to have a cell phone but not to use it for patched interviews.
In earlier surveys, Lim had done well, earning as high as 16 percentage points. The sample size in these surveys shows that people know who he is and what he stands for: anti-graft and corruption, education, health care reform, peace and order, food, energy sufficiency, agricultural modernization, national industrialization and electoral changes.
He was among those who joined groups from different sectors in their call for GMA to resign because of electoral fraud and graft and corruption. He was thrown in jail for this after The Peninsula Manila stand-off where the Armed Forces showed its capacity for overkill by unnecessarily smashing one of the glass entrances to the hotel’s fabled lobby, sending scores of sharpshooters dressed to kill to arrest the protesters gathered in a function room, including the media covering the event.
Deng said, “DL (the candidate’s initials) has been consistently slipping down because he has no TV ads.” With her enormous capacity for fund-raising, she will try within this campaign period to find the P16 million needed to buy radio-TV ads to run in the major networks for 48 days at the rate of thrice a day. The P16 million is already an advertiser-supporter’s heavily discounted rate.
The short TV ad will present Lim as a sundalong matapang na di sinuko ang prinsipyo, sundalong sumalungat sa kasalukuyang administrasyon (a brave soldier who did not surrender his principles, a soldier who defied the current administration).
As the women who’ve visited him described his simplicity and his off-the-cuff remarks to them, a catchy sound byte emerged. At one point, Lim told them after he was asked what he would do if he was freed and allowed to serve in a public position, “What I started, I will continue. I’ve been consistent all my life. Kung ginto ako, itapon mo ako sa putik, ginto pa rin.”(The last sentence in Filipino loses its strength in translation.)
As the campaign heats up this long hot summer, Lim will have to learn to say more palpable things on issues close to our hearts such as human rights, including lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender rights, strengthening the economy so it is not buoyed mainly by dollar remittances of overseas Filipino workers and the call center industry, the neglect of cultural workers, the best of whom we are exporting to, among other countries,"Hong Kong Disneyland," in Gou's words.
Another woman friend, Mia Protacio, a lighting designer and singer, wrote me after Cory Aquino's death this observation. We hope Lim will take these words to heart: "For me, the greatest outcome or effect of Cory's passing away is that it has made Filipinos embrace genuine and lasting values such as simplicity, spirituality, humility and purity of heart as opposed to the other qualities of supposedly successful or 'high-powered' individuals whom we normally idolize. A paradigm shift has occurred in the way we Filipinos revere greatness. Great now means simple. Great means humble. That is her true legacy."
And, if he will heed the women's suggestion, Lim will have to dump his general's uniform and change into civvies in his campaign pictures.
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