So the critics of the President took it upon themselves to criticize and to chastise him over the matter of…
A hotdog. The vitriolic anger, the righteous indignation, over… a hotdog. That being said, I wouldn’t even bother to add to the criticism or the defense, if only because in a country with too many problems and too many issues, picking on a hotdog is just silly.
The road to Hell, paved with good intentions, is also lined with the road-signs explaining that road. Like Department of Education Secretary Armin Lustro, for example, with DepEd Memorandum No. 392: where no homework shall be assigned to students in public elementary schools.
On the one hand it makes sense. What can be agreed upon as “extremely difficult homework” – issued only by incompetent lazybones in the teaching profession – can and do rob children of time spent on play, family, and friends. Yet this can be a bit too short-sighted – and as with many things in the Aquino Administration, well-intentioned – to think that a child’s school life is completely different and separate from the rest of the aspects of his or her life.
More than the usual heckles of “lazy children” and “lazy policies,” I think the “laziness” here lies more in the role of education in our society. The fact that homework is being undervalued here – where it seems to have not occurred to the DepEd’s mind that homework is supposed to be an activity for the entire family – means that we still view education as an external need fulfilled by classrooms and libraries. When in fact, to use an old phrase, it doesn’t end in the four corners of the classroom.
It began almost like a love affair between the country and its new President. The nine and a half weeks of the Aquino Administration began with a landslide victory that many found difficult to dispute, and ended with a hostage crisis many find difficult to defend. All we know right now of Daang Matuwid is the abstraction: the idealization of a long-term national project began by a President whom we thought can do no wrong. In the first nine and a half weeks, almost everything wrong happened.
Not that Aquino is bad for the country; somehow, the President’s training wheels – led independently in all sorts of different directions at Daang Matuwid - aren’t doing him much of a favor. There is no definitive stand: that the clarion call of unity and inner strength leads precisely nowhere so far.
There was no definitive stand on the issue of land reform, even if President Aquino may have been goaded into making one because of his blood-ties with Hacienda Luisita. There was no definitive stand in the Manila hostage crisis, making it appear that the President has done too little, too late.
My grandmother always enjoyed oranges. Her room smelled like orange peelings, the segments of dried-out fruit littered the wide plastic table that was her nightstand. As long as her arthritic hands were willing to, she always peeled her oranges herself. She dug her aged thumbnail into the center of the fruit as she peeled off the skin. The tangy, tart fruit brought a quiet smile to her face. It was as if the fruits were a calming presence in her life.
Well into her seventies, Lola was still very strong and able. She was 73 when I was born, and her quaint figure was instrumental in raising me. When my parents worked, she assumed a lot of roles: she cooked our food, she cleaned up after us, and kept us clean and healthy. Well into high school she made sure we hit the books, steered us far and away from trouble, and into her eighties, even tucked me in from the top bunk that is my bed. Carefully, at that: the two blankets and the comforter had to be perfectly aligned before she trudged out of the room, and into hers.
“The problem with the Philippines,” an exasperated relative once said, “is that there’s just too much democracy.”
For me, the problem has never been about having “too much of a good thing.” If we weigh democracy in terms of how many rights we have, then we are indeed a democratic society, as democratic as can be. However, having the opportunities and capabilities necessary to exercise those rights is an entirely different thing.
A catalog of rights is of little value to individuals. A person may have rights, but if he or she cannot exercise them in a free society, then those rights become accessories to living instead of being essentials. All rights are defined by limitations and frames; while rights are absolute essentials, one can think of them as absolute limits as well. For rights to be exercised by the individual, he or she needs the avenues and tools needed to exercise those rights to the absolute maximum.
* – inspired by “Our Poor Individualism,” by Jorge Luis Borges
For our neighbors in Asia, introspection is as much a political, social, and economic endeavor as it is a personal one. In Japan and Korea, leaders consider it a most honorable deed to step down from their posts when they become mired in scandal. In Malaysia, even the most corrupt politicians get the scurples long enough to be caught.
Singapore – almost always the case study for good governance and economic progress (the very antithesis of Gunnar Myrdal’s “Asian Drama”) – discipline is intertwined with introspection; enough that doing things “our way” may create diplomatic tension, but ensures domestic survival.
In the Philippines, it’s different. We engage in retrospection more than introspection. We pray more than we meditate. We cast blame and assert that the answers are out there, more than we do look inward and find the answers from within. We look externally; hence our poor introspection.
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