Revolution, evolution? No - it will be an implosion

During the past few days, alarming cries about the rise of poverty — and hunger — in this country were raised, one at the recently concluded summit on poverty led by Archbishop Antonio Ledesma and lawyer Christian Monsod; and another at my own conference, moderated by Senator Edgardo J. Angara last week: although it was about nation and culture, the unstated theme was poverty and it surfaced in the discussions again and again.

There will be those, of course, who will question the validity of this observation. Look at all the clear vestiges of progress all around us — the fat and glossy cars in the streets, the gleaming skyscrapers in our cities, the tony restaurants, the bloated shopping malls — and all those cloying pages of glamour and fashion in our newspapers. What poverty are we complaining about?

And yes, our banks are overflowing with lucre — as every economist who knows will tell you, billions and billions are stashed in them — the loot which the rich have squirreled away where it earns so little, rather than being invested it in innovative industries, because the very rich have no confidence in this country and its talented people. More than this, they have already salted away large chunks of their fortunes abroad.

I remember only too well that, when I was a child, most of us in grade school were barefoot. Not anymore — almost every school child I see now wears slippers, part of that, thanks to the effort of kindly people like Korina Sanchez. In my hometown, gone are the tiny houses with thatched roofs and bamboo posts — all are now roofed with galvanized iron and walled with hollow blocks. Widespread progress, indeed.

But we know that beneath this happy image of a progressive country lies a foundation that is rotten.

As Senator Edgardo J. Angara said at the conference on Nation and Culture last week, we are now the basket case of Southeast Asia in comparison with our neighbors, all of whom have surged ahead. We are at the bottom of the rung, competing with Cambodia. So once again, this old and nagging question: Why were we left behind when in the Fifties and the Sixties we were the leading nation in the region? Why are we poor? Why are we hungry?

At the Conference on Nation and Culture last Saturday, the painter Fred Liongoren asked: What is wrong with us?

What happened to us?

The present is an accretion of the past. We have forgotten this past and the restoration of memory, its strengthening, is one of the basic functions of cultural workers, particularly the writers.

In the past 100 years, three important events have tested us as a people — the revolution of 1896 and the Philippine-American War; the Japanese Occupation in 1942; and the declaration of martial law in 1972 by Ferdinand Marcos.

We failed all three; in the process, after each climactic event, our moral fiber was frayed.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the fragile institutions of freedom and government that we built were discredited. Ethics and patriotism were diminished, and in the process, we became poor.

We like to think that our courts are above this pervasive stink — but they aren’t. A lawyer told me that the cost of a temporary restraining order (TRO) starts at P20,000 — maybe it has since gone up. I am also told that in the Court of Appeals, even before a case is parceled out to the justices, the price of the case is already known. And remember that saying sometime back about a Chief Justice being “the best that money can buy”?

The discrediting of the highest court in the land has been steadily growing, since way back. But it reached its apogee with the appointment of Chief Justice Renato Corona. The man knew that it was against the Constitution for then President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to hire a new justice of the Supreme Court two months before the end of her term. If he had any sense of delicadeza, he should have rejected the appointment.

It is no wonder then that President P-Noy — elected by the people — would rage against this. Remember, the Supreme Court justices are not mandated by the people to serve; they are appointed by the president.

If a constitutional crisis occurs, the Supreme Court has only itself to blame. And who says it should be unsullied by critics?

The Ampatuan massacre two years ago is perhaps the most blatant example of how powerful warlords, backed up by the highest office in the country, have killed with such shameless impunity. The justice system — operating under that ancient rubric of “due process” — has not yet brought justice to the victims — all 52, half of them journalists. It is so easy to blame this most heinous of crimes on the traditional clan wars of the Moros — but the truth about it is that former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has blood on her hands. No wonder she can find little sympathy in her plight today.

This decay in our institutions, the moral malaise which hobbles us, is abetted by apathy, cynicism.

And so, one morning in the very near future, we may wake up and find that this nation no longer belongs to us and that it has imploded.

All our institutions shall have collapsed; widespread anarchy — the ultimate metastasis — will have destroyed not just our moral fiber but our very lives because there will be impunity everywhere, each man for himself.

In a situation like this, we will perhaps think that the military is the only institution that can hold the nation together — but then even the military will have crumbled, undisciplined, and just as venal as all the other law enforcing agencies.

Unlike a revolution which erupts and which everyone becomes acutely conscious of, an implosion is a slow, lingering process that will take years to evolve. In this period, people will adjust to the changes that come slowly then cumulatively destroy the whole of society.

Aside from the physical destruction which occurs, the internal damage is deeper and longer lasting because it cripples the spirit; violence becomes a matter of course, corruption and immorality become habits and people will not only learn how to cope with these, but they will also come to expect it as part of the system.

There will be hunger, ethnic strife, rapes, murders — all that occur in a failed state like Somalia and some of the African nations, destroyed first by corruption and dictatorship, their people unable to unite and fight back the fate they themselves created.

From this appalling condition, it will be difficult to rebuild, to establish the feeble beginnings of a new nation, not even with the help of the United Nations and its peacekeeping forces, or the International Court of Justice.

The NPA and Moro rebellions do not really matter. This is the doomsday scenario which I hope will never happen, which we can still forestall — but only if our leaders will listen to their bosses — which is us.