Putting my hopes up high in the chat room
One of the bad habits I've developed is staying up late on a Thursday night, knowing that I don't have to work early the next day.
As I always do on these boring, Thursday nights, I just browse through my online network accounts, browse through whatever is on the front page of Yahoo, and other stuff that I would have intented to visit online through the course of my day.
This was an extraordinarily boring Thursday night. No updates on any of my online network accounts, nothing really interesting on Yahoo, and so I had the urge to visit the Inquirer website to keep myself updated with the things going on back at home. There was one article that I found particularly interesting. The Senate Justice and Human Rights Committee have established a chat room where ordinary citizens like us can share our thoughts and give our legislature a piece of our mind. When they set this up, they even said that they'll take whatever - praise, comments, concerns, foul language, whatever.
I found this particularly interesting because the person who pioneered this (or at least as far as I know) is the chairman of the said commitee - Senator Chiz Escudero. For those of you who might not know, as a young high school kid, I've personally seen and heard him speak about politics and society - and at that particular conference where he spoke, I have seen his honesty and his integrity as a leader. And right now, with everyone taking a dip at the ZTE scandal and trying to make a name for themselves, as far as it reaches me here in California, I have not heard him trying to take a slice for himself of the popularity pie that this issue has benefited other politicians.
Even when he chose to become the spokesperson of the PMP during the 2007 elections, I still respected him even though I did not necessarily like the affiliation. One of the things I remember that he said way back then was that it was better to take a stand that people don't necessarily agree with than not having a stand at all - which is pretty much evident with politicians who play it safe and just jump from one ship to another just as the tides of the support of the Filipino people might shift.
In the end, I did sign up for the chat room, and am very much looking forward to getting the chance to speak to Senator Escudero directly. Just as a side note, one of my professors, Felipe Miranda of Pulse Asia, said that the unfortunate thing in Philippine society is that the people left with their integrity intact are those who would never want to enter the political arena, just because they know that the system is so corrupting and they're pretty sure they'd be corrupted should they decide to get in there. But I am positive that we still have statesmen like Chiz, and it is for this reason that I would want to be able to speak to him, to try and discover his values and principles, and evaluate if we still have good leaders like him, or if I am just putting my hopes up too high.
