This is the now buzzword, at least, in the US, and I hope it also becomes so in our country. In our social and political life, the system of people’s active participation in the direction of things should be put in place, regularly updated and adapted to changing circumstances.
This is what the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church says about this need: “Every democracy must be participative. This means that the different subjects of civil community at every level must be informed, listened to, and involved in the exercise of the carried-out functions.” (190)
Therefore, everything has to be done to correct attitudes and practices that hinder this property of a democratic state such as ours. They are many and, worse, very tricky and difficult. In the first place, we tend to deny we have these inadequate attitudes and wrong practices.
These deficiencies can be so embedded in our culture and social life that they have become normal to us. Even in the last barangay elections, I was appalled to see the same massive vote-buying and corrupting of the youth through the SK. But I think some stirring, shaking up and purifying need to be done.
We have to understand that even if our culture can be considered already rich and very uniquely Filipino, it has to grow with the times and face the new challenges. Otherwise it will die and rot, or at least produce toxin that’s bad to all of us.
In the US now, there is the upsurge of the so-called Tea Party, a kind of spontaneous reaction of a big part of the populace who think the Obama government is putting the dangerous liberalism-and-socialism ideology to the extreme.
Their efforts have yielded big gains in the last elections, kicking out a number of Democrats and putting into their Congress a big majority of Republicans who are at least more attentive to their sentiments.
Poor Obama is now a lame duck only after two years of office. A listing ship, he will face a grueling and bruising remainder of his presidency. The other object of their wrath, the brash Pelosi, is now dethroned from her speakership.
Both seem sad, but not sorry at all for their agenda that was roundly rejected by the people. But at least for now, they have to bow to the will of the people.
We have to hone our own participative skills in our social and political life. We already have had a number of tools and instruments for this purpose. To mention a few, we had the People Power, rallies and demonstrations, various initiatives in good governance and monitoring of officials’ performance.
We also have the Namfrel, the C-Cimpel, the Dilaab, etc. The list is long, thanks be to God, but it needs to grow more not only in number but also in depth and effectiveness. The more initiatives, the better.
First of all, there is the basic need for grounding every effort in this regard on the proper spirituality, one that regards our social and political action as an integral part also of the over-all effort to sanctify oneself and others.
It should be a spirituality that respects the autonomy of politics and fosters freedom and variety of views and positions. But it should be dead serious in developing our politics with charity, orienting it always for the common good and for God’s glory. Yes, God and politics have to be put together.
It cannot be any other way. If the animating spirit of these initiatives is reduced to some partisan views or to an ideology, I don’t think we can go very far. We have to be very wary of the many conditionings that clip the wings of our participative duties, like indifference, discouragement, self-pity, passivity, fatalism, etc.
At the same time, any effort to spiritualize and Christianize our politics should not diminish the need for rigor in attending to the many objective requirements of politics.
We have to check the competence of our officials, and find ways to monitor their performance. We have to devise a system of reading as accurately and promptly as possible the problems of the people, and of starting the process of attending to them. Criteria for judgment should be refined.
For all this, everyone is encouraged to do his part. We cannot rely only on the media. The quality of our politics can only reflect the quality of the people involved in it—that’s us. A good and indispensable tool is the social doctrine of the Church that offers us tremendous light.
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