Our prayer for a change

One point which Walter Lippman discusses in his book, Public Philosophy, is on the amount of time required by a democratic society to ingest a certain issue and formulate a plan of action on it.

In a system like ours, the people, resulting from a combination of many telling factors, really take a long time to develop a solid opinion on a given subject. We advance the reason that most of us are pre-occupied with our individual livelihood. After all, it is, by nature, our main concern. We would rather attend immediately to the business affecting our family. When confronted with a sweeping generalization that we have become a part of the unconcerned, mostly silent, majority and perhaps, to cover our emerging guilt feelings of selfishness, we always say that we devote our energies to provide our children with a better shape of their tomorrows.

Matters like the affairs of government take a back seat. Not that they do not concern us at all, but we would rather feel that other people, mainly our leaders and few other vigilant men, are taking care of that. We, by assuming that everything is a-okay, allow the few rotten eggs in government, to infect the more honest ones. We do not realize that, by our inaction (called apathy by others), we have also so demoralized the righteous that they too have given up to the onslaughts of the corrupt.

Let us take a more concrete example. Prior to the declaration of Martial Law by then President Ferdinand Edralin Marcos, there were signs indicative of the presidency's veering towards a dictatorship. He, as an essential prop to an authoritarian regime, pampered the military. Knowing that he needed to extend his tentacles throughout the land, he fed most of our political leaders at the time, with substantial perks and more importantly, some kind of an assurance of the perpetuity of their own local dynasties. To demonstrate his awesome authority, he made sure that the officialdom who did not toe the line, were booted out of grace to suffer ignominy or worse, if the tales of disappearances were to be pursued to their end, they were silenced.

But, as the dictatorship was evolving, most of us did not care. Only a handful dared to expose the evil aforming. The likes of Senators Benigno S. Aquino, Jr., Jose W. Diokno, Jovito R. Salonga, Lorenzo Tañada, and a Francisco Nemenzo, to name a few, remained steadfast on their profound sense of nationalism. The political opposition got decimated. There were those who, with tails between their legs, flew to the luxurious bosom of a foreign land. Many oppositionists turned coats and changed allegiances.

What was saddening was that the few who stood their ground against Pres. Marcos, seemed to fight a lonely battle. Most of us, by professing to be attending to our individual concerns, chose, in fact, to form part of the silent majority. As long as we provided our needs, we did not really care. For years on end, our indifference, nay apathy, allowed the situation to worsen. When we realized the gravity of our political cancer, the foothold of dictatorship was so very well entrenched that we almost plunged to a bloody civil war to cleanse our society. Our collective action, as written in general terms by Lippman, came in very late.

Today, we are going through the same apathy. We do not either show alarm that the powers that be are tinkering with the constitution even if the very objective of such a move appears, to me, less patriotic or push for it with vigor like Atty. Lambino does. Instead of being incensed that government agencies seem to ram a change in our charter obviously to pre-empt the setting in motion of impeachment, we are turning a blind eye at such hideous maneuvers as Peoples' Initiative.

This being holy week, I hope we find time to ask for Divine guidance. In the sanctity of our churches, we must pray for courage to stand up and be counted whether our sentiments be for the president or for her immediate stepping down from Malacañang. Indeed, let us ask God's help to make a paradigm shift from being silent majority to a politically active middle class.