Challenges Facing Phil Society - Challenges 7

The national chaos, not surprisingly, is encouraging millions to leave the Philippines and seek their future in strange lands. There they would rather brave loneliness, soul depravation, and broken homes than face the certainty of hunger, crime, drugs, hopelessness, and frustration.

We are our own worst enemy
We think the problem is only out there. But, in truth, the problem is also inside us. There is corruption and decline outside, because, inside many of us, we have died to our ideals, to our sense of freedom, courage, imagination, bayanihan, entrepreneurship, justice and fair play. We have found the enemy and the enemy is us.

There is a universal truth that we ignore at our peril. The most powerful governments and institutions exist only as long as citizens allow their existence. Rizal said it more simply and directly. “There are no tyrants if there are no slaves.”

Yet, for so long, we seem to prefer the status of apathetic slaves, quietly enduring the many sufferings inflicted upon us by corrupt, deceitful, unprincipled and egotistic leaders and their equally corrupt followers.  Instead of doing something about the decline of the Philippines, we hope that, someday, maybe the sufferings of our country would quietly go away. Our favorite habit is to complain about how bad the country is. Yet we do not lift one finger to make the Philippines a better place.

We have thus reaped the seeds of our own passivity and indifference. We now face the horror of a vastly more aggressive and arrogant army of corrupt leaders, professionals and followers in many businesses, government and congressional offices, media, schools, and even a growing number of religious institutions and NGOs.