As we promised, we are going back to our godforsaken congressional districts, all the more made destitute by our honorable congressmen.

We are not simply talking the talk as most of our armchair intelligentsias do within the confines of the academe or our bedfellows from Makati Business District breaking bread with their comrades in one cozy café in Greenbelt.

We let loose one simple letter to the provincial council where we grew up, Quezon Province.

We demanded some plain answers from the two of our honorable congressmen why they voted favourably on House Bill 1109.

Browsing thru the voluminous House Records of Proceedings, it looked like a desert as we failed to see on record some oases bearing the sagacious justifications from our local solons on the reasons of their championing the notorious Constituent Assembly Resolution. There were no interpellations coming from these two Quezon congressmen whom we have already named.

Their non-participation in the proceedings is too mute to ignore. Have we really elected our deputies to the lower chamber? This is the time now to tell our people that “we do not live by house pork alone”. Given a P75M pork barrel annually does not make a district representative a genius in its distribution. Any one with an IQ at par with these two congressmen can boast of some achievement in, say, constructing a multi-purpose pavement in Bgy. Ibas or Bgy. Ulong Tao. And that is not to say how much was pocketed from the much-ballyhooed government project. But there are ghost projects as well or over-priced medical equipment or medicine. Not only have they been sated with pork. These two low lives wanted more: a piece of the Palace Pig Out. Of course we are generous in acknowledgement that they need funds for keeping them in office. How can they afford their daily bacchanals and the life lines to their local choirs? What they are saying is that it is us who should understand them. They are spending the best years of their lives in the service of the people.

Hasn’t it occurred to us just how many presidents have come and gone and yet we are still mired in the same political quagmire? We massed at EDSA twice and drove the corrupt and the incompetent. Yet, deep down our collective guts, there still is something major that has to be done.

It’s our local leaders (congressmen, governors, mayors, etc.), stupid. For the last 25 years, these local leaders taught our young people that there’s money in politics. They fortified their local bastions. Look at the Aguilars and the Villars in Las Pinas, and the rest ad nauseam. And the City Mayor of Makati wants to be president.

These congressmen muscled out the Constitutional Initiative in FVR time. In Erap time two spectacular bills of impeachments were tabled, that of Chief Justice Hilario Davide and Erap’s Impeachment complaint no less. The bright boys of Danding Cojuangco shepherded the suit against Davide from the committee to the plenary.

Who are these bight boys? Two of them want to be president, Chiz Escudero, now senator, and Gilbert Teodoro, now Defense secretary. Without wasting any saliva, one Aleta Suarez of the 3^rd District of Quezon, lent out her Aye on the impeachment of the Chief Justice. When it was Erap’s turn to be impeached, the same better half of the now sitting congressman of the 3^rd District withheld her vote as a show of loyalty to her benefactor. Why she did not support the impeachment of Erap, nothing was seen on the records. The silence of these so called people’s representatives makes our historians and posterity impoverished for lack of accounts or memorials to rely on.

But how about the products of their pork? 20 years, give or take, our unforgiving Mother Nature has already pulverized them and their names consigned to oblivion.

Our young people should see at arms length the right leader that should govern them, flesh and blood.

The City of Naga and a few others have led us the way. They are not freaks. That’s the general rule. Our two low lives Quezon congressmen are the exceptions, who, from the words of Justice JBL Reyes are an abomination that, “(they) may be said to be a lawless thing which can be treated as an outlaw and slain at sight, or ignored wherever and whenever (they) exhibit (their) heads.”

Walking the walk, the Sangguniang Panlalawigan of Quezon has already acknowledged our simple request that they ask these two low lives for an explanation on their Con-Ass votes.

Failing which, we do not know where or how this dynamics would go. What we know is that talking the talk is over. It’s now walking the walk.