Published Work

7 Resolutions You Can Do for RP While Sitting Down

Whether you’re an office worker glued to your desk for most of the week, a Net junkie who loves blogs and social networking sites, an overseas Filipino looking to connect back to home, or simply someone with something to say, the power to set this country right is within your reach.

In these times of social unrest, when media focus hops from one controversy and “crisis” to another, Filipinos everywhere are saying, “I don’t want to condone these actions, but I don’t know how I can help.” They resign themselves to the fact that corruption exists everywhere, that their well-intentioned actions may not amount to anything, and that it’s perhaps best to leave political action to the politicians. After all, they would reason out, politics is dirty business.

But it wasn’t meant to be that way. In his 350 B.C. work, Politics, the Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote: “Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for mankind always act in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good [italics mine].”

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A New Year’s Resolution for our Elders

AFTER the press conference that introduced the Movement for Good Governance (MGG) to media and other supporters, I heard from one of the MGG “elders” something that I rarely hear: an acknowledgement — a thinly veiled apology, actually — that the country is still deep in muck because his generation didn’t do a good enough job of “fixing things” here.

“In spite of the activism then, we still didn’t do enough for the Philippines,” he lamented. “Most of us gave up on the country and focused instead on making a living. That in itself is not wrong, but we just didn’t try hard enough.”

He wasn’t blaming government for the chronic ills that have paralyzed the country. He wasn’t blaming the youth for being apathetic. He wasn’t blaming globalization for pushing developed countries forward and leaving the rest of the world behind. He wasn’t mouthing off a litany of complaints. Instead, he was facing a reality that many in his generation still could not see: that the failures of this country are aggregated results of THEIR own failures.

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Within the Joker’s Grasp

AND now we face yet another hundred-million-peso scandal, unfolding in real-time in the august chambers of the Philippine Senate, involving yet another fall guy who is now the country’s hottest topic (and butt of jokes) but who will later on be forgotten. The moment I heard his name — a few years ago, when my mom casually mentioned the name of the Rotary’s then-District Governor — I immediately felt that there was something fishy about a man named Jocelyn, who called himself Joc-Joc. I think that any public servant who respects his position enough should at least find a more suitable nickname upon assuming a position of great responsibility. Don’t trust a man who calls himself a joke — or, perhaps more accurately, a two-faced joker.

But I digress. This latest scandal to rock the Philippine shores — er, fields — paints yet another ugly caricature of this present administration and its cohorts and once again makes the Filipino nation look like a bunch of idiots. How can anyone justify distributing funds for agricultural inputs that are of the wrong kind, given at the wrong time, for the wrong districts? (And, oh yes, they were grossly overpriced, too.) I felt a brief moment of admiration for Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago when she admitted that, although she is an administration ally, Joc-Joc Bolante was simply “defending the indefensible.”

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