Wednesday, November 12, 2008 Valdehuesa: What's wrong with us and where do we start? By Manuel Valdehuesa Street Talk
IF SERMONS in churches were really effective, there would be no immorality, or, at the least, people would be less sinful. And if law enforcement in our republic were really effective, there would be no crime or corruption, or, at the least, our society would not top the list of Asia's most corrupt.
What is wrong with us and where is the locus of the wrongdoing?
To the Gising Barangay Movement, what is wrong with our society is what the Jesuit psychologist, Fr. Rodolfo Bulatao, termed as "split-level values." We are a people afflicted by, on one hand, a split-level sense of religious sentimentality; on the other, by a split-level sense of citizenship. In short, double standards.
We behave one way on Sundays/Holy Week and on prayer days/Ramadhan, and behave differently the rest of the days. In our political life, we claim to want good governance and an honest bureaucracy, but fail miserably to perform our duty to assure transparency and accountability to both. Then we cheat or sell a vote, bribe to gain favor, and ignore the governing unit, which conditions corruption on all levels - our barangay government.
All this duplicity, double dealing, and hypocrisy are happening right in the neighborhoods where we live, work, or do our living routine. It's in our barangays where the basic circle of church worshippers makes up the parish or mosque congregation, and also where the basic circle of citizens in the locality, the political constituency, is found. All things happen within and among these basic circles -- pious rituals coexisting cheek by jowl with political and socioeconomic transactions.
To speak of anything above this level is to deal with abstractions - numbers or generalizations, the aggregate of individual facts and happenings. The particulars of these facts and happenings are in the barangays. Aggregated, these are the numbers and statistics at the municipal or parish level, which consist of a cluster of barangays or congregations. Clusters of barangay-level congregations become a diocese; clusters of barangays become cities, provinces or regions. Thus, Cagayan de Oro consists of 80 barangays, while the nation is made up of 42,000 barangays.
One can't avoid going to the barangay or peering into it for the source or cause of what's happening in our society. It's where the particulars are: the location of every institution, the venue of every cultural phenomenon, the arena for every tradition.
All that concern us spiritually and physically are in the barangay, rural or urban. It is where we are born, grow up, work, worship, die and are buried. In it are the institutions we go to for services or assistance. Everything that touches our lives are in it: church or mosque, home or office, hospital or public agency, bank or shopping center, law court or police precinct.
To recognize and acknowledge the centrality of the barangay is to simplify the task of reform in our society. It is unrealistic to think one can reform the larger reality without attacking its particularities. Put another way: if one can't even reform one small barangay, which happens to be one's own, what makes anyone think he can reform a city of 80, or the country with its 42,000 barangays?
The next step would be to recognize our personal, individual role in starting the reform process in it. This role simply requires our active participation in its governing processes, mobilizing others to join hands. Other barangays are the responsibility of their constituents. To take responsibility for them is to be presumptuous and to discourage autonomy or self-governance in them. Of course, one can reach out to them, helping them, but first situating one's self within one's own.
Summing up, what's wrong with us is focus. We are all out of focus. Society's problems are right under our noses, in our neighborhood - the primary level of both the State government and the Church organization. But we the constituents and parishioners are at the abstract level of perception and action. We are uninvolved where it counts.
We deal with generalizations and summaries at municipal or parish levels, leaving the details of powerlessness, injustice, poverty, and corruption to trapos and heretics who control the barangay halls while we're in parish halls.
They're in control because no one bothers to show up except the poor and undereducated -- who they bribe, manipulate, and corrupt with patronage and dole-outs, and whose tainted votes frustrate efforts at reform.
One more thing: they're in control because they're doing all the work while most of us are either absent or inattentive or in church praying. Suggestion: let's do some of the work even as we pray!
(A former UN executive and secretary general of the National Union of Christian-Muslim Democrats, Manny heads the Gising Barangay Movement. Email him at valdeman_esq@yahoo.com.)
