You won your love but no romance on wedding night

By Al S. Mendoza

 

WEIRD, it was.

I mean, we won but we could not celebrate.

We won but our cheers were banned.

We won but we could not flaunt the triumph, let alone breast-beat.

What kind of a victory was that?

It was like seeing our Gilas Pilipinas top the Olympic Qualifying for basketball but jubilation over a rare trip to Rio was immediately declared a deafening no-no.

It was like seeing Manny Pacquiao knock the unbeaten Floyd Mayweather Jr. out but to rejoice over it was clipped like freedom under a dictatorship.

It was like you’ve just married the woman of your dreams but you couldn’t make love to her the night of your wedding.

What has become of victories that should automatically merit the loudest of hep-hep hoorays, endless love up to the midnight sun, all the way down the break of dawn?

Why don’t we pop up champagne corks, kill a Johnnie Walker or a Remy Martin, maybe?

Or, if that’s too expensive, gulp down beer, gin, or basi, perhaps?

We are scared of China?

For, by celebrating, boisterously, our court victory in the South China Sea, we might offend China?

And an irked, piqued, China might unleash its might and suddenly attack us?

Not militarily, but by an act of China’s 1.3 billion population to simultaneously urinate on the West Philippine Sea, in the process inundating the ocean and causing massive drowning.  Whoa!

In short, our victory in the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) making us the lawful owner of most parts of the West Philippine Sea was half-baked.

There’s but one reason for that:  The PCA’s “award” to us is unenforceable.

Meaning, since we can’t force our own will on the West Philippine Sea, the victory practically means nothing.

Our leaders couldn’t do anything.

By choice, my golly, they see our victory as empty as a typical politician’s promise.

It hurt some more if we think of China’s position to ignore the PCA hearings from Day One.

That was bizarre because China was a signatory to the UNCLOS (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea) in 1982 in The Hague.

The UNCLOS, designed to determine a country’s territorial boundaries of the seas, was PCA’s basis in resolving the PHL-China sea dispute.

We won but again, the question:  Why can’t we celebrate?

Perhaps, the answer is found in the reality on the ground—err seas.

Have our kabaleyan fishermen not been shooed away off Masinloc in Zambales by the Chinese coast guard two days after our PCA victory on July 12?

Indeed, we won.

But unlike in a regular basketball tournament, this victory has no trophy to be hoisted by the winner.

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