Now what?

Ancient Greeks had a tale or two about our current corruption predicament, specifically that of the ascetic cynic sage Diogenes of Sinope.

On many occasions in the daylight hours, Diogenes traipsed the streets of Athens clutching a lighted lamp. Questioned about his eccentricity, he replied: “I’m looking for an honest man.” Diogenes went to his grave never having found one.

Will we similarly end up despondent as Diogenes? 

At the rate more and more of our officialdom stand charged with corruption, perhaps.

And, the possibility might be just around the corner. Senator Ping Lacson, for instance, said last week some 2,000 or more alleged criminals in the flood control scams will soon pack our hellish jails. 

And, that’s only the beginning. Who presently knows how many thousand others dirtied their hands in yet to be unearthed similar corrupt schemes as the apocalyptic flood control scams? 

Corruption, in short, trapped us; and, going by the soothing remedies aired by those with naked power agendas that we Filipinos are supposedly inherently “corruptible,” corruption is trapped within us.

Still, for most of us the flood control thievery undoubtedly had a transformative political role.

So much so, we are forced to figure out how we could go about honestly answering the pertinent political question should the flood control mess get cleaned up: Now what?

As it is, such a question offers few answers. For the simple reason that we are momentarily caught, using the words of American writer Richard Wright, where “few are the people who know the meaning of what they are living through, who even have an inkling of what is happening to them.”

Still, this cautionary aside doesn’t bother repulsive political partisans or those harboring out-worldly intentions from hastily offering “possibilities of that which follows” the current corruption crisis. 

Hasty, since they surreptitiously employ hallucinated nonsense like, for instance, insisting the Vice President faces no corruption allegations; or proposing the malarkey that a military-backed billionaire businessman could form a caretaker government — which could become an “undertaker” government. 

But whatever those ignoble fictions are, they only mean one thing: destitute political improvisations in the face of an abyss. 

Or, if an abyss is too abstract, perhaps see it as devious smugglers crossing the border of the future bearing unknown cargo.

Anyway, those are presentiments that the corruption crisis is the incubation period of the monster lying dormant in our veiled future under the deceptively harmless guise of “saving the country.”

So, if the future is jostling our past and present, we are “in our documentary moment. This is it. And it is not a rehearsal,” using American actress Jane Fonda’s words uttered in another context.

But in searching for “what is to be done” next, take note that “we always begin to solve the problem too late — for the simple reason that the only alternative would have been to prevent the problem from arising in the first place, in the past,” as social theorist Slavoj Zisek observed.

Nonetheless, we still have to relentlessly seek workable solutions in the present, even if the past only remains strictly instructive. We can’t let a serious corruption crisis go to waste. 

Thus, we shouldn’t let the corruption crisis corrupt our best judgements or our hopes. We have a personal stake in what kind of country we are becoming and how things should be. We must still responsibly and democratically set in motion our age-old demand for radical political and social transformations that truly serve the Filipino people.