This months: Thought to Consider

What is a small society like ourselves doing here, talking about revolution and it's effects?

  I can tell you, why we were left behind by all our neighbors when in

the Fifties and the Sixties we were the richest, most progressive country in

the region and an economic tiger of the orient seas, when Seoul and Tokyo were ravaged by war; Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta were mere kampongs; when

Bangkok was a sleepy town crisscrossed by canals. China in the forties was always threatened by

famine. It had a population then of only half a billion. Now, with more than

a billion people, famine is no longer a

threat, although hunger still lurks in some of its distant regions.

Hunger has always been with some of us, too, but not as much as it is now

when  so many poor Filipinos eat only once a day. I wonder how many of you realized that.

  So then, why are we poor? Why do our women flee to foreign cities to work as housemaids(domestic helpers), as prostitutes; being a TNT in US wiping foreigners butts?

We are poor because we have lost our ethical moorings, this in spite of

those massive religious rallies of those neo-gothic churches sprouting all over the country, in spite of the nearly

400 years of Catholic evangelization.

  How can we build an ethical society? We must remember that so-called values are neutral - that so much depends on how people use them.  

  Ramon Magsaysay infused public life in the Fifties with discipline and

morality, Arsenio Lacson as mayor of Manila cleaned up City Hall. Even

today, shining examples of honesty among in our public officials exist, but

they are few and far between and they are

not institutionalized.

Educational institutions and proper teachings of values and culture is the real cathedral of a nation, But how many of our

teachers know this crucial function of education, how many teachers

themselves possess this sense of worth and mission?

  To know ourselves, to make good and proper use of our consciences, we must know our own history. So few of us do, in fact, we nurture no sense of the past.

  If our teachers know our history, if they soak it in their bones, then it

follows that they also impart this very same marrow to their students.

   We are poor because we are not moral. Can this immorality as evidenced by widespread corruption be quantified? Yes, about P23 billion a year is lost, according to NGO estimates.

  We are poor because we have no sense of history, and therefore, no sense of nation.  The nationalism must be brought before hand even to Filipinos abroad to lend a helping hand and assist in reforming the Philippines to get back on it's feet again to never abandon the country you were born, raised and live. many intellectuals is in itself the failure of those intellectuals to analyze that inward, socially meaningless nationalism.

  Poiticians opposed agrarian reform, the single most important

political act that could have lifted this country then from poverty and

released the peasantry from its centuries-old bondage.

  We are poor because our elite from way back had no sense of nation - they collaborated with whoever ruled - the Spaniards, the Japanese, the Americans and in whoever is in power to be SIP-SIP or kissing politicians butts. Our elite imbibed the values of the colonizer.

And worst of all, these wealthy Filipinos did not modernize this country -

they sent abroad their wealth distilled from the blood and sweat of our

poor. The rich Chinese to China, to Taiwan, to Hong Kong, the rich mestizos to Europe, and the rich pinoys to Switzerland, Germany and the United States - money that could have developed this nation and avoid poverty.

  How do we end this shameless domestic colonialism? The ballot failed; the bullet then? How else but through the cleansing power of revolution. Make no mistake about it - revolution means the transfer of power from the decadent upper classes to the lower classes. Revolution is class war whose objective is justice and freedom.

  Who will form the vanguard of change? Who else but the very people who will benefit from it.

    The peasant is the truest nationalist. He works the land with his hands, he

knows instinctively what the term Motherland means. He loves this earth,

even worships it. 

  But never romanticize the poor. Once, a group of oligarchs lamented the futility of their efforts in organizing and motivating them. When the elections came that year, the poor sold their votes, or voted for politicians who does not have the heart and knows how to serve the people.

  Understand why they are often lazy, contemptible, fawning, cheating and

stealing. Imagine yourself not having a centavo in your pocket now, and you don't know if you will eat tonight. There is nothing honorable about

poverty - it is totally dehumanizing and degrading. But once the very poor

are roused from their stupor, they become the bravest, the most steadfast.

They believed that with their faith they were invincible.

  It is with such faith and righteousness that our peasants rebelled in

living memory, the Colorums in 1931, the Sakdals in 1935, and the Huks in 1949-53.

  The Moro rebellion, the New People's Army - the cadres of both are from our very poor, just like it was in 1896. And now, here is the most tragic

contradiction in our country. Our Armed Forces - its officers corps - many

come from the lower classes, too; they got to their exalted positions through public examinations and entry to the Philippine Military Academy. Our Armed Forces enlisted men - most of them come from the very poor.

  When the poor kill the poor, who profits?

  The Ideology of the Revolution

  Revolution starts in the mind and heart. It alters attitudes to enable us

to think beyond ourselves, family and ethnicity to encompass the whole

nation. If the communists win, and I don't think they ever will, they will

rule just as badly because they are Filipinos unable to go beyond barnacled habits of mind, hostage as they always are to friends and family

and to towering egos. The same egos aborted the revolution in 1896, the

EDSA revolution in 1986, and now, we see the same egos wrecking havoc on the Communist Party. We see these egos eroding our already rotten political system.

  The core belief that should guide us in redeeming our unhappy country is in our history, in our peasantry. It is not in textbooks, in foreign

intellectual idols, in Marx. And what is this ideology which Bonifacio

believed in? Which those barefoot soldiers killed by the Americans believed in? Pedro Calosa, the peasant leader who led the Colorum uprising in Tayug, Pangasinan in 1931, said it is this: "God resides in every man. God created earth, water and air for all men. It is against God's laws for one family or one group to own them."

  God and country; translate this belief into your own words and there you

have it in its simplest terms the creed with which the unfulfilled

revolution of 1896 was based, and which should be the same creed that should forge unity among us.

  Who will lead the revolution?

  Certainly, not the masa, but one from the masa who understands them, who will not betray them the way our leaders betrayed the masa.  

  The leaders of the revolution could be in this society who have the

education and feelings for the people not just the masa but also, for the rich and middle class families who are not shackled by alien concepts, or the attitudes of

superiority, or the using and abusing the masa  or the personal aggrandizement -that destroys leadership and the willingness to serve the people. Such leaders, like Ho Chi Minh, must

lead by sterling example, with integrity, courage, compassion and

willingness to sacrifice for the benefit of all the people and not just for himself, who know that when the revolution is won, it is

time to change from conspirators to even better administrators, remembering that they have become conservative, that they must now work even harder and united they should stand to produce better and cheaper products. And this massive work of modernization can be achieved in one generation. The Koreans, Taiwanese and the Japanese did it. It is not the Confucian or the marxist ethic that enabled them to do this, they understood simply the logic of government which is service and that of commerce which is profit.

  By what right do I have to urge revolution upon our people who will suffer

it? What right do I have to urge the young to sacrifice, the poor to get

even poorer, if they embrace the Society's objective?

  I have no such right, nor will I call it such. I call it duty, duty, duty.

Duty for all of us rooted in our soil, born raised and who believe that our destiny is

freedom, freedom from crimes, freedom from poverty, freedom from environmental degradation, and freedom from too much Politicking!

Not everyone can bear arms, or have the physical strength to stand up, to

shout loudly about the injustices that prevail around us.

Recognize, identify our enemies and oppose them with all your means.

  This will then test integrity, commitment and willingness to succeed in one supreme society.

  Nobody need tell us the exorbitant cost of revolution, the lives that will

be lost, senselessly even as when Pol Pot massacred thousands of his own countrymen in Cambodia. We who lived through the Japanese Occupation know what hunger, fear, and flight mean.

  Joseph Conrad, Albert Camus and Jose Rizal - writers I admire deeply, all warned against revolution because it breeds tyrants, because it does not always bring change. But look around us, at the thousands of Filipinos who are debased and hungry, who are denied justice. Be shamed if you don't act.  And as Salud Algabre, the Sakdal general said in 1935, "No rebellion fails.  Each is a step in the right direction."

  A true and proper Revolution need not have to be bloody. It does not have to be violent. How many lives were lost at

Edsa 1? Not even 20. So Cory goes around telling the world that she had

restored democracy in the Philippines. Sure enough, we now have free

elections, free speech, free assembly but these are the empty shells of

democratic institutions because the real essence of  democracy does not

exist here. And that real essence is in the stomach - as when the taxi

driver in Tokyo eats the same sashimi as the Japanese emperor, or the bus driver in Washington who can eat the same steak as President Bush in the White House. Contrast these with that jobless Cavite laborer whose two children died because he fed them with garbage. No, Cory Aquino's Edsa revolution could not even have our garbage properly collected. Worse, 19 farmer demonstrators were killed near Malacañang because she refused to see them. True to her oligarchic class, she declared a revolutionary government without doing anything revolutionary; instead, she turned Edsa 1 into a restoration of the old oligarchy. So today, we are reaping the results of her negligence, ignorance and folly.

  Yet, even capitalism can be very helpful. South Korea is a very good

example of how capital was formed by corruption, and how a singleminded general lifted that nation from the ashes of the Korean War, into the thriving modern economy which Korea is today.

  Remember the slogans of American capitalism - a chicken in every pot, a Ford in every garage. Money is like fertilizer - to do any good it must be

spread around. Those robber barons at the turn of the 19th century were

rapacious, they exploited their workers, but they built industries, railroads, banks, the sinews of American capitalism. And the most important thing - they kept their money home to develop America. They are the enemy.

  It has been said again and again that we are, indeed, a young nation

compared with other Asian countries whose august civilizations date back to 2,000 years or more. Indeed, so are the Filipinos who shaped this nation - those who led the revolution against Spain - they were all young, like you are, in their 20s or early 30s. Rizal was 34 when he was martyred.

  How then do we keep young without having to grow old only to see the fire in our minds and hearts die?

maintain its vitality, its youth against the ravages of consumerism, of

globalism?

How else but to keep the mind ever healthy, ever alive by empowering it with those ideas that nurture change and revolution itself, by ingesting the

technological age so that we can use technology for realizing our ideals.

  How else but to embrace the ideas that make us doubt technology, society, even revolution itself, but never, never about who we are, what we should do and hope to be.

  We cannot be beholden to any other nation. Jose Maria Sison doomed his revolution when he turned to China for assistance; he ignored the "objective reality" - the latent anti-Chinese feeling among Filipinos, in fact among all Southeast Asians who fear a Chinese hegemony.

  We must mold our own destiny, infusing it with the strength of a sovereign

people. The Americans, the English, French, Russians, Cubans, Chinese,

Vietnamese - all achieved their unique revolutions. We must have our very

own, defined only by us.

  How to build it, direct it, use it for the betterment of our lives, the flowering of liberty - I see all these as the major function of the society which, after all, shapes our leaders.  I pray that it is high time to be united in one vision, one dream, and one voice and create a supreme society we believe in.