Depending on what echo chamber or algorithm you’re in, you might be seeing any (or all) of this on your social media feeds, private GCs, and public channels, since June 1 hit:

• Complete and utter denial: we were cheated! you say. Here’s a petition! Sign this petition! Or that petition! Or this one!
• Untrammeled anger: against anyone and everyone that you assert “enabled” this Marcos-Duterte win, which means calls for boycotting non-pink establishments and businesses, tendencies towards attacking private individuals on public Twitter, and seeing everything wrong with everything said and done by the old (Duterte) and new (Marcos) leaderships.
• Sardonic elitism: “Ang taas ng presyo ng bilihin? Bahala kayo sa buhay niyo. Ginusto niyo ‘yan.”
• Non-profit hope: Let’s go Angat-Buhay-NGO!

Unless of course you’re part of the other side of what is left of the political opposition. Which means you might be part of the Left and dealing with massive attacks, one after the other, across protests on the streets and in farmlands, to websites and social media, all via the ever reliable fascism of one Lorraine Badoy and NTF-ELCAC. It has been the most horrible way the Duterte government has kept the Left preoccupied the past five years—as if the incompetent anti-people governance wasn’t enough to make anyone’s head spin, and keep one’s people and resources perennially exhausted.

And then there’s the rest of us, of which I’d like to think there is a far larger number, who have so decided to just get back to our lives pre-electoral anxieties and post-electoral stresses. On the one hand, a seeming privilege; on the other, also one we have in common with the mass electorate that put Marcos-Duterte in power. After all, what is there for us to do after an election is won or lost?

While the more privileged than us will have the time, energy, and resources to already be calculating how to keep whatever power they have (*cough* the liberals *cough*); and the now newly-elected leaders and their cohorts will be having parties and planning their way into the halls of power; the majority of us, thrown on different sides of the political divide during elections, will come together and … continue to struggle to survive. This is what the middle classes have in common with the masses. There is little time we can spend wallowing in our sorrows or joy, because what we do have are bills to pay, work that we are thankful never stops, because otherwise, how would we pay our bills.

On the upside, the urgencies of the personal have quickly brought me back to the ground, with no delusions about what can still unfold from the electoral (Marcos is President), and with no anger about how it has been won (we should’ve known to do battle better). What this has also allowed is the ability to just be spectator to the end of one leadership and the beginning of a new one, which is really a very quick transition that we are being given very little information on, which is of course also Duterte strategy of the past six years.

But what it is showing us is interesting enough, and while I try not to keep my hopes up (I actually had tons of hope for Duterte’s comms team and Martin Andanar’s promises in 2016—would you believe?), I do think that some of the appointments are indications of a change in the right direction for the Marcos admin.

Case in point: the women appointments are powerful ones. There is no one more credible on the Marcos side for the newly-formed Department for Migrant Workers (DMW), than Susan “Toots” Ople, who I voted for that time that she ran for the Senate, and whose work for OFWs would put many on the Duterte side to shame (including … ahem … the outgoing OWWA Executive Director who has neither credentials nor credibility to have held that position). Yes, Ople has her limitations; but at least you’ve got someone who we can have a conversation with—a far cry from most Duterte officials who were always on the defensive and when shit hits the fan, would fall back on the claim of “fake news” against serious, difficult questions.

But Trixie Angeles for Press Secretary was probably the first brilliant move of the Marcos camp, and while those in the opposition thought this to have been payback for whatever work they presumed she did for the Marcos campaign, I thought instead that Trixie was being given a position that she deserved even during Duterte’s time. She proved it at that first press conference when she was expectedly thrown that question about her old critical posts on the Marcoses, about which she responded that she had the right to change her mind and that this is natural evolution. What I thought was brilliant about that moment was not so much her answer, but how ready she was for that question, so much so that there couldn’t be any more follow-ups, and the media was left with nothing more but another soundbite that actually could get even more people to change their minds about the Marcoses. Because how can we argue with the right to change one’s mind? And have you tried finding those vlogs where she talks about that change of heart? It’s difficult to find and we only have ourselves to blame—we weren’t listening or watching when it happened, and that kind of removal from what they were doing the past five years is really our undoing now.

The only thing that would make this comms team work even better for Marcos? Choosing Karen Jimeno for Presidential Spokesperson—she, who was the one bright spot in those SMNI non-debates. After six years of Andanar we could use someone who has the intelligence, class, and finesse that we have not seen at all in Presidential comms the past six years. And while Sir Bobi Tiglao has proven he can take on that post, I feel like a female voice is what this new government needs to, at the very least, surface that change in tone and tenor that we could all use after six years of a governance of the worst kind of kamachohan.

The Clarita Carlos appointment as National Security Adviser (NSA) was the second brilliant move, as it draws a very clear, pretty thick line between the Duterte and Marcos administrations. Duterte’s love affair with the military has been the bane of our existence the past six years, where militarized responses took  precedence not just over basic rights, but even common sense. Having a woman like Carlos as NSA has to give us some hope in the possibility of a better functioning military that is not at the mercy of whims of the President and his men, and is not just throwing its weight around because it can. One is certain that the military (and even the police) realize that their credibility has been ruined by the past six years that they served no one but Duterte and the NTF-ELCAC. Someone should be looking at the need to regain some of the public’s trust, and Carlos might be the best person to do it, given as well her very clear stance on red-tagging, among many other Duterte-normalized acts against the people.

Also normalized under Duterte, which I think these appointments are undoing is the dominance of male—and male ego—in governance, which I think the new leadership can eschew. There is every reason to demilitarize the Cabinet and our government agencies, and give it back to civilian officials. After all Sara Duterte is already flexing her militaristic muscle, and if Marcos wants to, at the very least, balance that out, it would him well to eschew the Dutertes’ over-dependence on, and overt weakness without, military might.

While we’re at it, there is absolutely no reason for Marcos to continue employing someone like Lorraine Badoy, who is the one woman even Duterte could’ve done without. It was always bad enough that the NTF-ELCAC lived off red-tagging online and illegal arrest sprees offline; what made it worse was having Badoy as its mouthpiece, that inane voice of unreason that would put even the worst of the right white supremacists in America to shame. We could all do better than having that stereotype of the insane woman in government for another six years.

Marcos could do so much better than Duterte’s dregs. ***