Cartoon By: Aaron Paul C. Caril
EDITORIAL
The year 2025 and the hope it brings
As we approach the end of 2024, we stand
ready to welcome the new year with a prayer filled
with hope.
Like in the previous years, extreme weather
conditions battered the country. This year’s record-
breaking typhoon season saw six consecutive storm
systems hit the country in under a month. Studies
attribute the storm systems to climate change.
Climate experts expect the year 2025 to be just as
bad, or even worse, than 2024.
The election of the Philippines as the host of the
Loss and Damage Fund (LDF) Board, a United
Nations panel in charge of funding for responding to
loss and damage due to climate change, brings hope
to the Filipino people who are at the receiving end
of the effects of climate change. A 2024 World Risk
Report says the Philippines is among the countries
most at risk of the impact of natural events for the
third straight year.
During the second half of 2024, we witnessed
the epic collapse of the UniTeam of President
Bongbong Marcos Jr. and Vice President Sara
Duterte, that political alliance of parties who
catapulted our top officials with pagkakaisa as their
campaign promise. Midway into their term of office,
the UniTeamand its promise of pagkakaisa crumbled
like a house of cards founded upon nothing but the
individual selfish ambitions of the people behind it.
Now, we have politicians who offer nothing more
than their greed for power glossed over in their
narcissistic version of public service.
The midterm elections on May 12, 2025 is
another chance of redemption for the Filipino
people, a chance to choose our best leaders to steer
the country until the end of the Marcos Jr.
administration. While the framers of the 1987
Constitution envisioned the Philippine political
system to flourish with a multi-party system, we
currently have political parties with no strong
political platforms and politicians who make an
exodus to the administration party to look for
campaign funds and projects for their constituents.
We indeed reap what we sow. Our present
dispensation results from what we have planted in
the past. Be that as it may, we can still count on the
new year 2025 to usher in a beacon of hope, a
chance for a fresh restart. God gave us the free will
to choose what is right. Let us, therefore, do what is
right in our own little way.