“Make sure the poor have reason for hope.” - 1999 Nobel Economics Laureate Armatya Sen.
Nine out of ten Filipinos entered the New Year with hope rather than fear, Social Weather Station concludes from a nationwide survey. “Are we the hopeful of the hopeless?” a friend in Jerusalem emailed? Or is there hard-nosed basis for this rosy forecast?
Our “elites” scoff at ordinary – and largely poor – people as “passive”. It’s their code word for less-than-bright. Yet, before 2007 started, ordinary citizens trashed the attempt by the House of Representatives, backed by President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, to castrate the 1987 Constitution and tighten their grip on power. Earlier, people beat down military buccaneers and political “outs” to clamp on juntas. And they stonily ignored the call by ex-president Joseph Estrada, a fragmented opposition and radical left, to boil into the streets. .
These were crossroads choices. “Passive” citizens made them without the usual massing on Edsa’s well-beaten path. Was this “People Power” in a previous forgotten format? And in 2007, will this power zero in a tainted Commission on Elections that a spineless Ombudsman has refused to straighten out?
Discerning the future has never been one of man’s special strengths. How do you factor in the unpredictable? “Crystal-balling” is about making educated guesses of what lies beyond the horizon. From today’s realities, one sifts the trends likely to endure -- and reshape tomorrow. “In today, tomorrow already walks.”
Looking ahead is demanding. Many of our leaders’ mindsets extend only up to the next elections. And few have the vision that goes beyond one, let alone two or three generations. For example, flushing aquifers, contaminated by salt due to over-pumping, as in Cebu, can take two centuries or more.
Those who’d push horizons further out, do so for their grandchildren. When the future finally arrives, most will be in their graves .Nonetheless, the drill to glimpse ahead usually reaches fever pitch on New Year. “If you could look into the seeds of time / and say, which will grow and which will not”, Banquo tells Macbeth.
Solita Monsod concisely summed positive gains posted by the economy did in 2006.—which gives hope. In 2007, will these gains translate beyond repaying IMF into more fully in alleviating misery of the poor? Out of every 100 Filipinos, 38 remain handcuffed to a daily income of P98. “Hope is the poor man’s income”, the old Danish proverb says.
But the blight resulting from skewed wealth of moneyed oligarchies is patent. The number of Filipina mothers, who die at childbirth, crests at 200 for every 100,000 pregnancies, UN Human Development Report notes. Compare that to Malaysia’s 41. And chronic hunger stunts 32% of our children, compared to 2% for Singaporeans. Communication is a key to development. The 54 out of every 1000 Filipinos who hefts a cell phone looks impressive -- until you realize that 109 Thais do.
Out of every 100 grade school kids here, 75 finish Grade V. But 92 in Indonesia do. The implications of a half-educated people are chilling. “All democracies live in fear of the ignorant,” Harvard University’s John Kenneth Gailbraith said. “There must be a knowledgeable electorate…or surrender to the voices of ignorance…”
We have to make up for lost time. Korea started to pull ahead of us in the 1960s. Today, Korean GDP is five times that of Filipinos. Over the last 25 years, Filipino incomes grew by only 2.6 per cent. That’s “cadaverous when compared to Thailand’s eight times”, says UP’s Dennis Mapa. And that sound of racing footsteps is Vietnam which could overtake us next.
Yet, we will stumble into 2007, as we did in 2006, without an approved national budget, warns Joker Arroyo, one of our better senators. Both Senate and House have been unable to agree on the appropriations bill. So, future government operations will be strapped into a budget for a vanished past. “You can never plan the future by the past”, the statesman Edmund Burke once said. But then Burke never saw our Congress.
“In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of,” Confucius writes in the Anaclets. “But in a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.” And that’s why the Philippines is lagging in meeting the Millennium Development Goals of reducing poverty, infant mortality and other threats.
Look at the past. Those who gave us hope were not those who occupied official positions. They were mostly being ordinary men and women, self-effacing individuals, in our communities, who poured themselves out for others. Some have been recognized. For marshalling private resources and government cooperation to build homes for the poor, Tony Meloto of Gawad Kalinga richly deserved the Magsaysay Award.
All of us can draw personal lists of many others who work with little notice. Some nuns, I know, scrounge for medicine, soap, food for hundreds of prisoners, write to their families, and seek scholarships for their children. A Cebuana physician ministers, as a Medical Mission sister, to lumads in Bukidnon. A woman-lawyer spends time giving free legal counsel to the poor. Some friends help patients and families in the leprosarium.
The list is of such people is long. They give fretful people like us reason for hope. “And if you keep green boughs of hope in your heart,” the old Chinese proverb says, “the singing bird will come.”
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