Hoping for the better

Hope springs eternal for the Filipino, and surveys bear this out. The latest, taken by pollster Social Weather Stations (SWS), showed that 85 percent of Filipinos are entering the new year with hope, up slightly from 81 percent in 2004.

Since SWS started conducting surveys on hope in 2000, the number of hopeful Filipinos has not been lower than 80 percent. Starting with 87 percent, the number rose to 88 in 2001, shot up to 95 percent in 2002, then dipped to 90 the next year before plunging to 81 percent in 2004.

Who said the nation is in deep despair? That’s a lot of hopeful people in a land of grinding poverty, spite and bad governance. After all those political scandals, soaring fuel prices, the impact of the expanded value-added tax and an endless stream of bad news, we still end the year with hope.

Politicians and other public officials should be careful not to take credit for this. While the state of the nation surely has some bearing on the level of hope, it’s more of a cultural thing.

Tomorrow is always another day for the typical Filipino.

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This is not surprising, considering that international studies keep showing that Filipinos are among the happiest people on the planet.

Even when our main source of livelihood is wiping other people’s butts, as pessimists afflicted with hemorrhoids like to point out, we’re still at peace with the world, ever ready to grab a microphone and belt out The Impossible Dream on any karaoke system. We laugh at everything, including our own misfortune.

We should take a leaf from Bhutan’s book and measure Gross National Happiness alongside the gross national product, measuring the country’s prosperity in terms of the people’s general well-being instead of consumption.

Bhutan’s King Jigme Singye Wangchuck has been pushing the concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH) since being crowned in 1972. Economists are actually taking notice.

It would be interesting to measure GNH in the Philippines, where we like to say people are easy to please and have a low threshold of happiness: mababaw ang kaligayahan.

The results should validate the consistently high level of public hope reflected in the end-of-the-year SWS surveys.

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Equally interesting are the top New Year’s resolutions listed by the SWS respondents in the fourth-quarter survey.

At the top of the list: to be a better person and improve one’s attitude.

Behind by only one percentage point was the resolve to work harder, find a job or venture into business.

These resolutions came ahead of stopping bad habits, becoming more frugal and having a better love life.

New Year’s resolutions, of course, are merely best-efforts pledges that are often broken within the first week of the year.

The SWS survey results only show you that President Arroyo is not the only one who keeps breaking her New Year’s resolution.

In her case, she said she is reviving her resolve to shed her taray image. I think it’s a lost cause; you can’t teach an old female dog new tricks. She’s been working on her empathy since the day she realized she had an acute deficiency of it – which was several decades ago – with disappointing results.

A more doable resolution is to deliver good governance. Don’t expect too much though — she’s never coming clean on the "Hello, Garci" scandal and producing the rope for her own hanging.

But she can push her official family to improve the delivery of basic services, particularly education and health care. She can improve irrigation and farm support services to boost agricultural production.

She can resolve to give every Filipino knowledge of information technology and access to the Internet, even if only through a single communal computer in every village. Filipinos cannot afford to be left behind in the Information Age.

The President can also tell public works officials that anyone responsible for construction and repair projects that turn out to be substandard will be punished, and she should mean it.

And since this means she will be cracking down on corruption in public works deals, she should make her anti-graft campaign government-wide, starting at the top levels of the bureaucracy.

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Now we’re getting carried away by too much hope.

The surest way for any anti-corruption campaign to succeed is by setting the example. Is leadership by example possible for a President governing in the shadow of alleged jueteng payoffs, fund diversions and other scandals?

Unless we excise corruption from the system, we cannot guarantee the kind of environment conducive to investments that will create enough employment opportunities to bring home millions of Filipinos working overseas, a number of them admittedly making a living wiping other people’s butts.

The Philippine diaspora cannot continue indefinitely, even if remittances from overseas Filipino workers this holiday season keep pushing the peso to new highs. And even if those international studies on happiness were taken among Filipino expatriates, many of them working as maids, who said they were happy with their lives and seemed to mean it.

Surely levels of hope and happiness would be even higher if those workers were not separated from their families, and if we could all get our act together so there would be enough reason for Filipinos to hope for a better life.

When SWS conducts its next fourth-quarter survey on hopefulness, there must be a firm basis for that high level of public optimism. We can’t be hopeful simply because we are genetically wired for happiness.

A happy, prosperous New Year to all!