MANILA
Are the cheating, stealing, crimes of all sorts and widespread corruption in our country the “new normal”?
Let’s take the recent elections (last May 13) as an example. Violence against one another, cheating, unfairness, deception, deviousness, and a general tendency to break the law. These are among the bad things we do just to get what we crave.
They don’t speak to the strivings of a relatively young nation whose people tout themselves as intelligent, enterprising, courageous and world-class.
We have no sense of country.
We don’t know how to build a nation, how to make it strong and permanent. We need to look at what’s happening to society, what’s happening in our neighborhoods, in places of business that get burglarized, and in both the streets and homes where innocent people get hurt or killed by lawbreakers who make an excuse out of being poor.
The common excuse of criminals is, “I was in need; I needed to feed my family.” What about the person that that criminal robbed, hurt or killed? Didn’t he need to feed his family, too? Now that he or she is dead, who’s going to take care of the orphaned family?
We need to look at the big picture for this is what we’ve failed to do. We lament the crimes, the cheating of all kinds, the taking advantage of the weak and vulnerable, the retail and wholesale corruption, the stealing from businesses or private homes, the kidnappings-for-ransom, the riding-in-tandem phenomenon that involves assassins killing people while riding a motorcycle, and many other willful violations of the law (such as bus operators who field multiple units with the same license plates).
We complain about corrupt politicians, private armies, armed criminals, hoods in judges’ robes, thieving bureaucrats, shoddy products in our stores, inefficient service from public utilities and government bureaucrats, profit-hungry oil companies, and so on and so forth.
We whine about those things and many, many more but fail to decry what all these acts and crimes, taken together, are doing to us as a society.
What they do is continually erode and destroy us as a nation. “A nation never falls but by suicide,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. We are slowly committing suicide and, before we know it, we will all be gone, society will be asunder, and the nation will be dead.
We are divided by politics, religion and economic classism. We have become a community of individuals, in itself a contradiction in terms. A well-functioning community consists of team players, not individuals, out to win the game for all. Instead, we’re composed of colonies of self-interests.
Ant colonies are more cohesive, coordinated and choreographed. We are the opposite: we’re forever fighting against one another, when we’re not stealing from each other.
We lack focus as a people. Because we don’t see the big picture, we concentrate on little, often inconsequential, things.
We’re distracted by things we shouldn’t even waste a minute of our lives on. The lives of other people, especially the so-called celebrities, telenovelas that titillate the simple-minded, and fantasy television shows that don’t even make sense, occupy our time. And we crave gossip so much; whole shows are devoted to it, with even news programs putting in their share.
Politicians manufacture controversies to hide their failings as public servants. And when the dust settles from their contrived entertainment, our attention has been diverted from their sins against the public, either through historical revisionism or corny “pick-up” lines by politicians that we lap up with glee because we’ve been brainwashed to accept their regurgitations as erudition.
There are far more important things that should occupy our lives, attract our scrutiny, and invite our anger. Let’s not be too onion-skinned and bristle in anger over fictional “gates of hell” (author Dan Brown’s description of Manila) or whether our children have complete limbs (supposedly a comment by actress Claire Danes).
Let’s forget about nonsensical “controversies” and instead rage against those who steal from us every day, inveigh against poverty, and demand that the government help the poor, the vulnerable and the weak.
Let’s make those who ran for office promising to make our lives better get to work and fulfill their promises. Let’s not allow them to take advantage of our individualism and selfishness and, thus, control us.
Those who control us, whether it’s government or big economic powers, like things just the way they are. They like us divided and quarreling among ourselves for it’s easier to divide and conquer when we’re already divided. And of course they like us poor, the better to keep us vulnerable and helpless, and forever begging for their patronage.
We as a nation need to refocus our attention and energies. We need to depolarize ourselves and work as one people.
We need to be a Japan, where people don’t have to riot and loot to get a piece of relief bread. We need to be a South Korea where, when faced with national bankruptcy, people volunteered their personal money and jewelry so their government could pay its debts.
We need to be like the Scandinavian countries where people are embarrassed when they earn or own more than their neighbors.
We need to be a serious people, one that isn’t easy to satisfy or fool. One that makes a big deal out of Independence, national heroes Jose Rizal and Andres Bonifacio, and not of show biz stars domestic and foreign. How many of us participated in the last Independence Day (June 12) rites?
How many went to shopping malls instead? There’s no great country that doesn’t make a big deal out of its independence or national day.
We must be a people that prefer museums to malls. Malls don’t create serious jobs or churn out machinery or products that will generate more economic activity.
Don’t we wonder why the government allows its citizens to be hired by mall owners and then let go after five months to escape paying them regular benefits?
We’re a people distracted from the serious things in life and we don’t even know it. We’re so easy to please (mababaw ang kaligayahan) and to manipulate. Those who control us give us cheap wages, cheap products, cheap service and cheap entertainment.
We’re thrown bread crumbs and we’re already delirious with gratitude. No wonder we would settle for “trickle down” instead of an “equal share” of economic growth. But that’s an accepted economics term, someone told me. And that’s exactly the problem; we accept everything “experts” tell us.
We enjoy our sad lot so much, we’re not even aware we’re being robbed blind. We’re so distracted; we don’t even know our pockets are being picked.
***