Diktats, Laws, and the People's Representative

AND why all this trembling around an imagined dictatorship under the presidency of one candidate with a perceived political will and a disgusted mouth against narcopolitics, criminal syndicates, and elitist governance? It seems we have lost our talent to verify meaning in our own use of words, so much so that even that candidate uses that word in the same light.

photo borrowed from http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2015/11/22/1524725/dutertes-presidential-bid-now-table

     Dictatorship. A condition where one cannot move freely or progress to other desired outcomes due to stifling diktats. As if that can only occur under martial law or a police state.
     Dictatorships are created not solely by a giver of diktats but by the reception of them as well. And diktats need not come in the form of commands under threat of a gun bullet wound.

IN all past regimes including the present, there has always been a dictatorship of legalism we hardly ever noticed. The stifling of the citizenry's freedom by laws that do not serve the people and serve the leaders or managers more or solely, the reason precisely why they would remain untouched by legislation, is already a diktat by itself against which we find ourselves helpless. All we could do face to face with them is rally for change, and when the judiciary area of government happens to side with the side of the people the managers would always find a way to go around the text of the new judicial law by the sheer genius of their legalism.
     The mother of this dictatorship is actually simple to see. Since the start of this century, we have actually been suffering from the dictatorship of the laws of representative democracy that have limited the people's voice to their right to vote for political stars alone, stars who will then decide for us and our lives every step of the way during their term according to the laws of the representative-democratic system. We have been disallowed from voting on laws and policies, by diktat of the law of the land, as against what other parts of the world with direct democracy instruments offer.
     Dictatorship is also coursed through enforced laws, not through appearances or tough talk. We have forgotten to look at the dictatorship of our present laws, the reason why we seem to believe there is no dictatorship in the present as you read this.
     Well, remember this. The next time a government official gives you the alibi that certain things could not have immediate solutions or cannot be changed or are slow to change because of certain laws and procedures that we have to follow, even while that official has legislators under his control for being with his ruling party, you can be sure that he is serving you nothing less than a platter of dictatorship.
     Never mind the pork barrel that can change names under the genius of legalism. Never mind all the public information that cannot be viewed through a law we've been clamoring for, since all we can really do in a purely representative democracy is clamor to our legislators. Never mind an "anti-epal" law that can go no farther than be a short-term soundbite from the attention-seeking proclivity of some politician's lip service. The management of the laglag-bala scam alone that we the people could only be helpless against, except perhaps with the aid of a new airport cellophane industry that wraps our luggage with the only possible medium of trust for now, is already quite a manifestation of the sort of dictatorship of inutile or uncaring governance that we've continued to suffer even under the present regime of Benigno Aquino III.
     We haven't even started to talk yet about the traffic problem on EdlSA that Mar Araneta Roxas has told us to accept as a byproduct of progress, or the dismissal and replacement of maintenance companies for deteriorating MRT 3 the selection of which has been deemed a prerogative of Department of Transportation secretary Jun Aguinaldo Abaya, or the failure to distribute sacks of relief for Typhoon Haiyan's victims that we could only gawk at in disbelief, all of which have been managed by the texts for legalist diktats that we could do nothing against except grumble on the spaces offered by cathartic social media. We haven't even started to talk yet about the Lumads' displacement from their lands that are now inhabited by Armed Forces of the Philippines-defended paramilitary groups servicing in turn multinational mining interests. All defended by the diktat of press secretaries' and apologist Winnie Monsod's words that we can only swallow without question or with silence.
 
THE Aquino sort of legalist dictatorship did not come to exist because of Aquino alone. It exists because we collectively chose and continue to choose to accept it and its words. Or could do nothing but accept it and its words, because of the enforcement of laws via the legalist use of them.
     And so it'll be the same henceforward. The dictatorship of any future president will happen when we accept its words the way we accepted Aquino's. And the only way that acceptance could be good is if that dictatorship serves diktats against our corporate enemies and oppressors alone and none against us, serving the will of the people thus, even if still only via one's socialist representation. [S/I]