Hopeful

Hopefulness is a choice. Our people choose to be hopeful whatever the odds.

Pollsters tell us that more than 9 out 10 Filipinos are hopeful for the New Year. A majority hold firmly to the belief that life will be better next year.

Filipinos must rate very high in hopefulness. In the direst times, we find the silver lining. In the most challenging circumstance, we find comfort in the thought that tough times never last.

The other day, fishermen found a woman and her child. Floods swept them to the sea. They floated for three days, eating raw fish and drinking seawater. But they never gave up, hoping they will eventually be found.

This woman epitomizes our people. Her ordeal, and her tenacity, must be the allegory of our times.

2022 was a difficult year. A lot of what made our lives difficult draw from factors beyond our control.

There was nothing we could do about the war in Ukraine that forced up fuel prices and stoked inflation. There was nothing we could do as one small country to hold back global emissions of greenhouses gases. Climate change resulting from this caused severe weather events for us more than most others.

Inflation is a global phenomenon. We could not swim against this tide. Interest rates are raised everywhere to combat inflation. High interest rate regimes, however, discourage investments. This will affect the quality of our lives.

As we cross into the New Year, there is little about the larger trends that would encourage hopefulness.

Climate change will not be reversed in the next year. In fact, we will likely hit the dreaded 1.5-degree increase in our climate that would make warming irreversible. The spike in fossil fuel prices encouraged backsliding to the use of coal to generate power. The endless international conferences held each year have achieved nothing to bring down emissions and rescue the only planet we have.

The war in Ukraine will likely drag on. The past few days, Russia has rained even more missiles in Ukrainian cities in this century’s greatest act of brutality. The damage these missiles cause will make life miserable for millions of Ukrainians. Some of them die from the attacks; others could die because of the cold. There are limits to how the brave Ukrainians could repair their critical infrastructure faster than Putin’s forces bomb them.

Some analysts say the war is at a stalemate. Considering Putin’s appetite for brutality, a stalemate is a murderous condition.

Ten months after the Russian army invaded a peaceful neighbor, it is clear that Russia cannot win. This does not mean that Russia cannot kill. Putin seems determined to make Ukraine suffer for this country’s courage.

It is certain the war will continue into the next year. That means that Ukrainian agriculture, that feeds ten times its own population, will remain ravaged. Food prices will remain high.

The economic sanctions imposed on Russia will keep energy costs high long into the future. High energy costs will force a recession. The longer this high cost energy regime continues, the less the world will be able to address hunger and poverty, the deeper the global recession could become. It is not only the Ukrainians who suffer the consequences of Putin’s derangement.

We are caught in the crosscurrents of geopolitics. Tensions have been rising in the Korean peninsula due to the escalation in Kim Jong Un’s missile tests and the military pressure being exerted by China on Taiwan. In addition to these two flashpoints, we find ourselves in a territorial dispute with China as well.

China is both friend and enemy. She claims parts of our exclusive economic zone and has deployed a large flotilla of seaborne “militia” close to our shores.

However, China is also our major economic partner. We look forward to increasing our trade to help our economy prosper. We have, however, found it difficult to calibrate our mutually beneficial economic partnership while at the same time pushing back on the bullying of her superior armed forces.

We expect President Marcos’ visit to Beijing next week will result in better business partnerships and less military confrontation. Nevertheless, the delicate balancing act we are forced to perform in this relationship will continue long into the future. Fortunately, our voters did not elect to power a leader with a simplistic view of this relationship – a view that could have courted absolute disaster.

Climate change, global recession, the war in Ukraine and rising tensions in our own neighborhood notwithstanding, we continue to work hard to eke out a living and, collectively, produce some growth in the national economy.

This year, we outdid ourselves, growing our economy faster than expected. Next year, our growth will likely be moderated by the contraction of some of the world’s largest economies.

But there is no indication our economy itself will slide into recession. Things will have to dramatically worsen elsewhere for us to be dragged into recession.

As a people, we seem to have a talent for finding the silver linings around the darkest cloud and for snatching small victories from the jaws of defeat. We will grind out the next year as we have done many times in the past, creating growth from inhospitable circumstances.

Our hopefulness as a people seems to draw from our capacity to endure the toughest times and find cheer in the smallest gains.

May this New Year bring out, if not the best of times, at least the best in us.H