Lumuha ka, aking Bayan (Weep, my people/my country, weep)

For most of the year now ending, we grieved as a people over the loss of some of our most precious public goods and basic liberties. Our Constitution, customs and consciences were viciously violated, our treasury pillaged and plundered, and all by the powers and forces that were supposed to protect and promote those goods and liberties. Congress became a willing and eager captive and tool of the Palace. And for a while, Supreme Court Justices lay in mortal fear that they would follow the path of Chief Justice Renato Corona who was impeached and removed for applying the agrarian reform law on Hacienda Luisita, the Cojuangco family estate.

Yet in a rare act of courage, when the time came for them to declare what the law was, the Court unanimously struck down PNoy’s pork barrel system, also known as Priority Development Assistance Fund and Disbursement Acceleration Program, as unconstitutional and void. It was a blow to the jugular which sent PNoy writhing on the canvas.