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SC Flag Rites Alchemy

IN THE ANCIENT magical arts, alchemy involved the use of myriad substances blended together in order to produce a special potion that witches and wizards use in their tradecraft. It is believed at times that using invisible ingredients can produce something out of nothing. That is, something visible out of things invisible. At least.
Today, political journalism in the Philippines has a way of conjuring things from thin air. Sometimes to the shaking heads of readers who felt aghast at such violation of what is rational versus the propagandist slant in newsmaking.
When senior Supreme Court associate justices had been bypassed in the appointment of Associate Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno as the new Chief Justice, attendance in the flag-raising ceremony every Monday seems to transform from a mundane routine in the High Court into an exercise "abundant" with political interpretations; a politico-alchemical conjuring, so to say.
Should the absence of certain justices during Monday morning rites mean anything? The researcher in my head asked a neglected question: Does reporters in these exercises ever made a note (exactly writing down who and how many were present during flag raising ceremonies through the years, every day) on the attendance sheets in the Supreme Court before CJ Sereno took office? Knowing human nature, it may be a show of superb discipline should SC justices maintain a 100-percent attendance during flag ceremonies. Knowing human nature, even SC justices may prefer to hit it straight to their offices instead of attending such a "potentially boring exercise" as flag-raising ceremonies, unless such absence had been made unlawful in their own internal administrative rules, a charge for lack of nationalism.
I believe it is high time that court-circuit journalism will let go of this alchemy. Too much had been read into these actions already without any baseline statistics to support such conjuring. Even if that observation was correct, does that matter much to fuzz about? 
At the end of the day, we cannot expect even our associate justices in the Supreme Court to be exemplary nationalists despite their positions in the halls of law-defining in the government. Nationalism is not for every Filipino. Even the most nationalist Filipino may have hated the country in some moments in their lives, knowing fully well how this country's leaders have treated great Filipinos in history. Nationalism demands so much cost few Filipinos were and are willing to pay. Not even an associate SC justice. So we just leave it at that.
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