Terms of Misdirection

 If they truly wish to mirror the protests in Indonesia, they must first understand what fuels them. Enough with repetitive slogans from a handful of pampered students reciting ideologies imported from rebellious academic enclaves, but gather the raw, unfiltered anguish of communities drowned by floods, betrayed by blueprints, and erased from the margins of official concern. Let the ones hurling mud be those whose homes were swallowed by waters unleashed by ghost flood control projects, schemes signed off by congressmen and officials who treat infrastructure as a ledger for personal gain.

The fury must never be misdirected. Contractors are merely the middlemen. The real architects of suffering sit in air-conditioned offices, tallying profits siphoned from public coffers. These are the politicians who have amassed fortunes that make the contractors’ corruption look like petty theft. In Indonesia, the rage is not staged—it is authentic and spontaneous. It is the kind of fury that razes the homes of the corrupt, not for spectacle like what Filipinos do, but because the people have been pushed past the brink of silence.

In the Philippines, however, rage is curated. The media, with its polished anchors and corporate leash, redirects public anger toward expendable villains, shielding the true predators. Here, congressmen are not just protected, they are embalmed in impunity. Unfortunately the Armed Forces, once the supposed guardians of the republic, now serve as sentinels for the very figures who bleed it dry. They do not defend the people; they defend the machinery of theft.

And those students flinging mud at the contractor’s gate? They waited for the cameras. Their fury was timed, pre-planned, and televised, aimed to mislead the nation, and to pacify their anger towards corruption. A spectacle designed to funnel outrage against the fall guys, while the true culprits feast behind walls built from stolen taxes.

This is not new. We’ve seen it before—in the Marcos-era "revolutionary" theater, where dissent was permitted only if it served the optics of reform while preserving the architecture of plunder. We saw it in the post-EDSA years, when the same dynasties rebranded themselves as democrats. And we see it now, in the age of algorithmic distraction, where rage is monetized, sanitized, and rerouted away from the oligarchs who authored our poverty.

If protest is to mean anything, it must be rooted in truth. All we see is theatrics, and not pain. Everything is optics, and the rest is injustice.