How safe are we?

Exploding buses. Carnappings. Kidnappings. Victims set aflame by their killers. Media persons killed in cold blood. While all this may sound like a week in the life of a war-torn country, it isn’t. Welcome to the Philippines.

Of course, things are not really as bad as all that — we still go to work, have lunch at the mall, and go to the grocery; we do all the other mundane things that make up the life of the average working Filipino. Anyway, we’ve faced similar problems before — a few years ago the explosion at the Glorietta Mall caused a great deal of panic in Manila. People kept indoors and stayed away from public places. Then after the lapse of a few days, we were back at the malls. We Filipinos are, if anything, a resilient and perhaps fatalistic people.

However, despite our innate resilience, these recent events have caused me to be afraid — not so much for myself but more for my family. When I heard about the bus bombing yesterday, my first thought was: Is my family safe? My second thought was: How do I keep them safe?

Surely we are not strangers to violence; but to me nothing is more frightening than the violence that hits one who is going about his daily life, where the victims are not soldiers in war-torn areas but ordinary people like Iris H. Teniola who rode a bus simply to go and buy herself a pair of glasses.

Last week when I attended a wedding hosted by the Malaysian Ambassador to Manila, I was seated beside a Malaysian lady who told me that in 1962, she had been sent to Manila to learn about governance in the Philippines. She said that during that period the Philippines was looked upon as a model country in Asia — one of the most progressive, economically robust, and democratic. According to her, Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, was a largely undeveloped city and was seen as backward compared to the Manila of the early ‘60s. Proudly, at that time we were the second most developed economy in Asia, Japan being the first. Shamefully, now we are a middling Asian country still struggling for our take-off into developed status.

This Saturday I will be attending a conference, the aim of which is to ask the participants to imagine the Philippines 25 years hence. I’m excited about participating because having aspirations — concrete and specific goals or objectives that we work towards — is an essential first step towards improvement and development, whether on a personal plane or even on a national one. However, I’m also cautioned by that conversation with the Malaysian woman because I’m certain that in 1962, Filipinos of that time aspired as well — perhaps to become the most developed country in Asia — only to reap the bitterest of disappointments.

But we need our aspirations. Nothing of any great consequence was ever achieved without a sense of hopefulness. And while I want to aspire for great things for my country — economic growth, distribution of wealth based on justice and equity, elimination of poverty and protection of our natural resources — I keep coming back to the most fundamental of my aspirations: I want my family to be safe.

When you really think about it, personal safety may in fact be the most difficult and perhaps most important aspiration of all. Safety is not only a basic concern, it is also a comprehensive issue affecting many other areas of our society. Accordingly, if we want to address the problem of kidnapping, then we will have to attack its very roots: poverty, corruption, and the justice system. Though not a justification, we know empirically that criminality rises when people are deprived of economic options and are faced with crushing poverty; therefore, addressing criminality must necessarily involve addressing poverty.

Additionally, kidnap-for-ransom groups flourish when they have insiders at the police department to help them cover their tracks. And certainly, with prosecutors and judges in the back pockets of these criminal syndicates, they can then commit crime with little fear of reprisal. Consequently, to seriously and substantially reduce kidnapping, Filipinos must do some very difficult things, such as reforming the justice system and getting rid of corrupt public officers. Simply, if we want to be safe, it is not enough that we run after criminals. We must destroy the foundations of criminality and we must likewise create a society that adheres to the rule of law.

So the very basic aspiration for safety will actually entail a great deal of effort and will necessitate wide-ranging reforms. Corny as it sounds, it will also require value-formation. Ultimately, if we are going to create a society that is safe, then we will have to raise children who are civic-minded, respectful of authority, and who will be, in short, good Filipino citizens. Because, in the end, it is an enlightened citizenry that is the final bastion of our democracy and the real insurance for the safety of a nation.

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E-mail the author at adel.tamano@yahoo.com.