Righting all this mess - CHASING THE WIND by Felipe B. Miranda

Many people continue to be amazed at how so many things get to be messed up in the Philippines. From critical political exercises like impeachment and elections, to vital economic programs like privatization and foreign investment generation, to nuts and bolts concerns like power for companies and homes, public transport and communication and the most basic needs like potable water, breathable air and human shelter, it is hard to miss the presence, the regularity and the extent of messing up in this country.

Yet from one year to the next, the entire nation puts up with everything. Every now and then, a dramatic outburst might take place. Occasionally, some soul-searching may even be experienced. Still, after the drama and the angst of the moment, nothing is really sustained which enables the nation and its institutions to irreversibly change the historically messed-up state.

So, poverty persists across generations and institutionalized inequities dominate in the form of tragically maldistributed economic resources and dynastically monopolized political prerogatives. The elite’s self-serving romances – those fictional accounts of a nation and its government heroically working at democratization, the emerging rule of law and lawfulness, the increasingly entrepreneurial course of the economy and the progressive implementation of social justice – continue to be accepted by most of the public.

This unconscionable condition could not have been sustained if the public had not been successfully miseducated regarding the objective course of its nation’s history and, fundamentally, the actual conduct of its political and spiritual leadership. The imperialist influence in Philippine history and the treasonously collaborative character of most of the leaders which Filipinos innocently trusted with their nation’s patrimony and its future have not been preferred subjects in the formal courses offered in the country’s educational institutions.

A small minority of perceptive, patriotic Filipinos – until recently representing no more than the minor and at times persecuted tradition in Philippine education – had tried to point out the lies cluttering the fiction of benevolent imperial rule whatever its specific economic, political and spiritual forms might be. "Special and close relations" with imperial authorities had been misrepresented by many Filipino leaders – themselves fully knowledgeable about the inimical consequences of such arrangements on the nation’s economy and its political sovereignty but personally benefiting from them – as consonant with the people’s welfare and indeed vital to the national interest.

The enormous success of this campaign to miseducate a victimized people has not inclined most Filipinos to appreciate the exquisite irony of O.D. Corpuz’ summary evaluation of Philippine-American realtions – "much too close for comfort and much too special for self-respect."

The systematic miseducation of the public not only in imperialism but in all other dimensions of a nation’s collective existence leads to a confusion in people’s minds regarding what is probably true and that which is simply apparently true. The first requires reason for validation, the other demands no more than what could be dressed up to look reasonable, more precisely reasonably attracive than reasonably true. The first is the proper domain of the intelligent and the patriot, the other is the abode of the schemer and the scoundrel, attributes every traitor invariably reflects.

Deliberate attempts at public miseducation succeed largely by creating ambiguities in the mindsets of the target people. When a nation’s ability to define its political and spiritual ethics is emasculated, when notions of responsible governance are confused with images of lawmakers being above the law they enact, with public guardians being free to plunder and rape their own constituencies, when finally heroes and heels merge into the same amorphous entity in most peple’s minds, the inevitable consequence is, of course, what Filipinos now mostly have – a messed-up country.

A truer sense of the nation’s objective history, a necessarily painful reinventing of the citizenry’s educational institutions and their unabashedly honest priorities – marking the interests of the community here and now ahead of personal or sectoral interests in some parallel universe or some precious afterlife – and, finally, a willful determination to right up the nation’s mess whatever it takes now – in the present generation of Filipinos – all these at least will be needed to right most of our historical and current wrongs.

There does not appear to be any real alternative any more.