Responding to the challenges of our national life

It is paramount that our countrymen become active participants in shaping Philippine society.

Our archipelago has experienced hundreds of years of servitude – first under the colonizers, next under the Filipino elites. This is not to say that our elites are all the same. Yet on the whole, the Philippines has been wretchedly unfortunate that our leaders have unfailingly sold our interests either to the colonizers or to the devil.

Today, the manifestation of this betrayal is in our clown-operated, corrupt-ridden and elite-dominated politics. This system is instrumental in preserving the country’s basic social strata: tiny upper class; small middle class; and huge under class.

We have an exceptionally dysfunctional political system where the unworthy and the corrupt are elected through money and propaganda, if not force. Political contests are not clashes among programs of governance and ideas but merely of personages. Voters inevitably succumb to personality politics.

Not a few voters accept payments for their votes to secure food, at least for a day. This corrupt system has become entrenched, sustained by an economy that is strangulated by a minuscule segment of society.

The majority has always been held hostage by destitution. Poverty flourishes from landlessness by the farmers, wages that permanently lose its races against inflation, scarcity of capital, or simply lack of employment opportunities.

Poverty is aggravated by alcohol and smoking, vices that benefit the enterprises of the rich. It is also worsened by high birth rates, an aftermath of the absence of a family planning culture. The same poverty pushes the needy for quick-fix solutions like jueteng and lotto among others, which are directed by those connected to the powerful.

For hundreds of years the majority has been hoping for progress to trickle down somehow, but to no avail.

Elite-domination of the economic and political systems is buoyed by an educational system whose thrust is to produce a diminutive group of recruits who will join the ranks of the upper and the middle classes. Alas, this gargantuan and government-managed educational machinery has been unmindful of the massive “idiotization” of the populace for more than a century!

Lacking in quality all these decades, our educational system boasts of producing hordes of ill-trained but diploma-equipped graduates. Added to this are millions of uneducated people who end up at the belly of an exploitative economic complex.

Cultural substance of our national sorrow

Underneath the political, economic and educational dilemmas is the culture of negativism that has perpetuated these triumvirate problems for centuries now.

This package of cultural afflictions includes the following:

First, our cultural divisions as a nation feed the abusive nature of political praxis.

Second, our alienation to the rule of law is actually employed against our interests by whoever governs as they apply the law with impunity.

Third, our lack of pride and love for our nation are at the base of our self-discrimination vis-à-vis foreign cultures.

Fourth, our mediocre standard in doing things is at the heart of our daily life that pulls us further down.

Fifth, our acceptance that our country is ever hopeless is a sure formula for failure as a nation – indeed, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Lastly, our lack of serious long-term planning, whether in the family, community or nation, always brings us to a point that is oblivious of history and devoid of recognition of coming pitfalls.

Just like any organism whose parts must coordinate, we need to get our acts together.

But how can we free the mind with an empty stomach? How can we excite the heart with a hungry mind? And how do we feed the stomach if the mind and the heart are in conflict? We have evolved into a self-flagellating nation, so willing to embrace the cathartic feeling of failure!

In truth, a sick body that is fed cannot be healthy instantly. Any solution to our predicaments will always have to attack the political, the economic and the educational protractedly and simultaneously – just like how an unhealthy living organism will have to partition whatever little nutrient is given to it.

Ironically, solving all the foremost of Philippine troubles synchronously will never solve any one quandary rapidly, will not satisfy any of us immediately, and will not deliver the promise of societal freedom instantaneously.

Liberating the nation from the manacles of underdevelopment obliges a supreme sacrifice: an unqualified commitment at solving national hurdles. More than casting off our old skin slowly and bearing the pain of growing the new, it is the sick Polis that we ought to cure if it is social, economic and legal justice that we seek to institutionalize.

Leadership in every corner of our lives

Attacking only one of the three – the political, economic and educational – will never resolve anything. It will only plunge us in more mayhem as the two others will destroy the fabric of a single-head solution.

The answer really lies in the changing of our mind-set, reshaping our attitudes, fine-tuning our values. Cultural changes like these will sustain the prolonged trek toward social freedom.

Political, economic, and educational reforms are naught if we will fail to propagate national unity, the rule of law, pride, love for the nation, a culture of excellence, an undying hope for and confidence in ourselves, and an unending desire to shape the future that is robustly anchored on the past.

This is where leadership from the top, middle and below should come in. It is time to realize that no single national leader can ever extricate us from our tragedies. We ought to catapult all our communities into positions of leadership. We must produce standard bearers of change in every aspect of society.

We need groundbreakers from every region to ignite the paradigm of diversity akin to the united colors of a rainbow, rather than the vista of zero-sum competitions in a game of cultural politics.

We need social engineers who will gradually reset the purposes of our thinking, imbuing us with a consciousness not only of our rights but also responsibilities to each one and to the imagined community of equals.

We need game-changers who will spark tiny nation-oriented impulses in our hearts that will eventually create tidal waves of dissent against being an underdog in this world. We need warm bodies to help rewire our minds to persistently ameliorate our standards so that the produce of our hands and grasps of our minds will negotiate our odyssey to world excellence. 

We also need more economic activists among enterprises to create job flows and a sprightly environment that will habilitate our people in envisaging a future with and in the nation. We need Filipinos whose souls as nationals embrace their communal history, disposed to transcend the present and to scrutinize the shaping of our future.

Everyone could contribute what he yearns to do, guided by the light from his lamp intent on positively creating a resilient nation that is intact, bonded and forward-looking. We need to arrive at a juncture where we can all always imagine that the prosperity of one lies in the existence of the totality of the national entity that has been forged by centuries of searching for a meaningful life. – Rappler.com

Prof. Rolando S. Dela Cruz is an award-winning educational innovator, an education reform advocate, and a multi-awarded literary writer. He is also the President of the Darwin International School System. He is an alumnus and faculty member of UP Diliman, who was also a scholar at the Osaka University (Japan), the University of Cambridge (England) and at the University of Leiden (the Netherlands). He won The Innovator category in Rappler’s 2013 Do More Awards.