Seven of Nine: To The Wedding

Inside the cab, on our way to Antipolo City to attend a friend’s wedding, we, Jayr, Pow and I, had an intense debate on the plight of the Filipino people and the incapacity, as blindly observed by most people, of the government to supply the needs of its people. My thoughts that time stood on the ground where things could be viewed macroscopically, treating society, people and government, its co-dependent components, as one intricate interconnected system. One cannot exist without the other. People need to exist to have government and governance is important to have a stable society, to maintain a cohesive collection of interacting human beings. Government is a veritable result, unavoidable one, of social species living in assembly in bounded area. People and government, government and people, are the two major components of the society for us unconventionally, in functional and modern definition, to call it as such.

I can’t really remember how we started the conversation, but the thoughts on this matter we were throwing to each other are still vivid in my mind. Jayr blamed the government on the current state of the Filipino. In his opinion, as he asserted, the government did not meet its responsibilities to the Filipino people. I disagreed. For me, we cannot blame everything to the government. For a society, to advance its state, each component should comply and meet its role in concerted effort for all political and economic platforms to work smoothly. The economic platforms of the government this administration period are robust enough to alleviate the economic state of the Filipino. However, patience is needed because these platforms take time to achieve their converging goal. Not just patience, every member of the Filipino should do they share, because any massive economic reform cannot be pushed forward if there is no concerted effort of the collective to move it forward. Everything boils down to intricate and interdependent relationship of the people and their government.

With the understanding of this intricate relationship, we can now synthesize the clear picture of the events in Filipino society. For me, as I can see it, the government is indeed fairly doing its parts, as you can see in all massive economic restructuring. I believe, the government, and specifically the President, has a holistic and committed agenda to uplift the economic state of this nation. Now, after we have seen the effort of the government, let’s focus our attention to the other component of the society, the people. Are they doing their share? We cannot say that the whole Filipino populace is not doing its share, certain classes only. I observed that Class C and D Filipino masses are not doing their share. Their doubts and clamors hinder the whole nation to move forward. How I wish their trust and understanding of the Philippine governance should grow up. They are the ones who create a vicious cycle of the economic cancer of the Philippine society. Their old system of beliefs and skeptical view of the economic agenda of any President, who somehow they elected, feed the soul of the opportunist, monstrous, voracious, and greedy politicians, as heightened by the selfish and irresponsible media. These are the members of the society, most specifically the Filipino, who have done nothing at all but ruin all the good intentions of the government. They have exaggerated the concept of democracy, and those who have understood the clear and technical workings of it have also exploited this frailty of lower Filipino classes.

The other thing I iterated during our debate is the weakness of some of the lower classes of Filipinos, the attitude of misplaced contentment and love of quick money. Because of these I claimed that they are not doing their share. They are contented to wake up by noon and sit around doing nothing at all waiting for the government to provide them their day to day needs. Sometimes, I believe they have this concept of government as provider of their actual real needs, like any politician giving them rice, canned goods, etc. daily. They are expecting that someone will work for them to feed them. The government exists not to provide us tangible things in the form of packaged goods handed out to us daily. It exists to provide us ways and means to feed ourselves. These classes of Filipino people did not absorb the teaching of feeding someone with fish and teaching someone to fish. Another frustrating attitude of these classes is the love of quick-money. Most believe that they can get money easily, by just sitting around the corner and waiting for someone to give them money. One case, that I had learned few years ago, that proved my thoughts on the Filipino misplaced contentment and laziness, was the mass housing project of the government such as BLISS, etc. I found out that some beneficiaries of the housing sold their units and went back to the squatter areas and beg the government again to provide them housing units. Imagine this, they were contended to live in squatter area in exchange of the cash that they can get from selling their units as provided by the government. This is indeed misplaced contentment.

Jayr scolded me because of this. He told me that I was judgmental and prejudicial. He asked me if I ever tried to live with them and had fully understood the plight of the lower class Filipinos. Yes, I tried to be with them for years and I realized that they were the one who created that mess in their lives and not the government. Seeing them in cyclical miserable lifestyle with contentment and seeing their reluctance to do something with it further proved my beliefs that the Filipino masses are just looking for scapegoats for all the mistakes that they have done in their lives. It is not the responsibility of the government to wake them up in the morning and tell them eat your breakfast and go to work. I stressed out to Jayr that it was sympathy that made him to be on their side and not because of logical understanding of the workings of collective system. He was touched because he saw their miserable situation and he forgot to look at things in historical and macroscopic view. He should have asked himself, are they doing something to get out from this miserable life? For me, I would answer no. They are just keeping their lives in this cycle of poverty that they have created.

To truly move the country to certain level of development, or to remove poverty from society, the lower classes of the Filipino should start changing their views and should start working their asses to provide their family with comfortable life and to provide their children with fair level of education so that they get out from the cycle of impoverished lifestyle. They need to stop blaming the President for their plight. They should have asked their selves, is it really the government that brings misery to our lives or is it ourselves?

The problem with the Filipino lower masses does not come from the set-up and execution of our governance. They put themselves in that level. It is their individual effort to alleviate the status of their life that will end all of their woes. Development and good society won’t come from the government but will come from the individual effort geared towards concerted agenda of eliminating poverty. Everyone must do their share.

We ended our discussion to another topic that I will be discussing soon. It has something to do from the leap of the Philippine culture from Agricultural to Industrial, missing one important revolution that I believe we need to undergo. For now, I have to end my thoughts here.

Anyway, when we arrived at Gen’s house we dressed up immediately because she was already furious. We were quite late for her wedding.

Here are some photos: