From lockdowns to the new normal. From relative peace in Europe to the horrors of war. From a return to a roaring economy to relentless inflation. And from Duterte to Marcos Jr.
The year 2022 saw the world transitioning from enduring the constrictive repercussions of a deadly disease to yearning to be free from it – resisting further Covid-19 restrictions that stripped much of our social life. The people revenged: They went out to bars, hugged one another and gathered again in concert halls. Even the Chinese people, long been hindered from dissenting to their government, protested the zero-Covid strategy of their authoritarian government, headed by Xi Jinping, in an extraordinary fashion tantamount to the protests of 1989 in Tiananmen.
Filipinos didn’t want to deal much with Covid-19 either. Even with new variants springing up, we never really cared anymore. Thus, when the government announced in October that face masks are now optional in indoor and outdoor spaces, we breathed a sigh of relief.
The usual chock-full of shoppers in malls and bazaars during the holiday season is back. So as the moviegoers in cinemas awaiting foreign blockbusters and local celebrities’ latest outputs, albeit relatively smaller in number than the pre-pandemic. And concerts staged once again, watched by throngs of supporters who trooped from different parts of the country. If the recently concluded Eraserheads reunion concert, with a head count of about 75,000, is a sign, social distancing is becoming a mirage.
But nowhere does that mirage more evident than in the first half of 2022, when we were again put to the test to elect our next leaders. It was the war of optics between Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., who ran to vindicate his family’s tarnished reputation, and Maria Leonor “Leni” Robredo, who tried to reclaim the presidency for a diminished opposition.
It was a toxic election deemed as a battle for the sake of history and democracy. A day after Mr. Marcos Jr. and his running-mate, Sara Duterte-Carpio, amassed a whopping 31 million votes apiece, I wrote that they completely revamped the way elections are run in this country by “shunning competitive debates and legitimate media interviews, building an alternate universe filled with deceit and lies that was honed for years as part of a large-scale rehabilitation process to vindicate their names and whitewash history” and that their supporters “displayed the most shocking amount of hypocrisy online, painting their critics as elitists, purists, wokes and outright stupid without looking at themselves in the mirror.”
Thus, the reins of government were handed from a dictator wannabe who remained popular in the eyes of the masses until the very end to the son of a late dictator who, surprisingly, didn’t have much appetite for dealing with controversial issues such as the war on drugs and communist armed conflict.
The year 2022 saw the world transitioning from enduring the constrictive repercussions of a deadly disease to yearning to be free from it – resisting further Covid-19 restrictions that stripped much of our social life.
Mr. Marcos Jr.’s presidency, instead, was mired by his tendencies to be profligate, making unnecessary leisure trips abroad in the guise of official business and conducting parties for each member of the family. He solidifies the Marcos branding: never shy to display excesses.
What made matters worse was that amid the lavishness, the nation was suffering from the sluggishness of the economy, with the war in Ukraine as the main culprit. Inflation in November reached a 14-year high of 8 percent. Prices of oil, sugar and onion rose dramatically: Oil hovered between 70 and 80 pesos at one point. Sugar exceeded 100 pesos per kilo in October. And onions made people cry when they reached a whopping 700 pesos per kilo just this week. It was the “golden age,” as critics like to mock, as the price of basic goods became seemingly equal to a gram of gold.
The peso wasn’t spared from the economy’s reversal of fortunes. It depreciated to a record P59 to $1 in October as the US Federal Reserve raised interest rates to cool down inflation.
The economic whirlwind could not have been exacerbated in the first place if Russia didn’t invade Ukraine in February with the purpose of “demilitarizing” and “de-Nazifying” it. The war, dragging on for more than 300 days now, has abrupted the relative peace permeating Europe. It forced the West to take decisive action, supplying embattled Ukraine with guns, bombs and other military equipment and providing aid to citizens displaced amidst a humanitarian crisis.
The war not only reshaped Ukraine and Russia, but also the world, as its stamina and faith has been severely tested by the domino effects it unleashed – economic hardship, massive government spending and testy international diplomacy.
In 2021, I warned that we “must gird for another year of physical, emotional and political toll.” When the lockdowns were lifted, we were bombarded by controversies that took us a toll physically, emotionally and politically. The transition was swift, eye-opening and exasperating.
Featured image from Wikipedia.
The Edj View 