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Saturday, September 18, 2004
Roperos: Belt-tightening time
By Godofredo M. Roperos
Politics also
One walks the streets of the city today and almost at every turn one notes someone who appears to have lost his or her sense of humanity.
Clothes tattered and dark with dirt, hair unkempt, feet unshod, and looking dazed, they have become little symbols of a society that has somehow lost compassion for those who have less in life and love.
This is not to say that the great majority of our people no longer nourish a sense of affinity with one another. No, not really that.
But with the way those who ought be role models of our people are behaving, projecting an image of crass individualism, there seem to exude in our midst a pall of social alienation.
It is as if each Filipino is working only for himself and a small circle of friends that could never include country and everyone who lives in it. They exclude those outside the parameters of their delimited kinship.
This is aptly demonstrated today when we note with quiet alarm and dismay how even our elected leaders establish their respective areas of responsibility as separate fiefdoms responsible only to the overlord.
This is utterly debilitating to all efforts of unity and nationhood. How can a people, in conscience, be able to call themselves a nation if even among neighboring towns or cities, leaders cannot strike a common cause for growth?
It is said that a nation’s strength and progress is nothing but the collective strength and growth of individual communities that compose it, working together as one towards a common goal.
I cannot see this notion happening, for example, between Cebu City and Talisay City, or among our provincial leaders. We see no sense of unity a show of collective force for the benefit of everyone, regardless of creed, politics, or social calling.
It is not enough to say one is Filipino; he must truly be one with our country and people.
What would it profit our country and people if at every turn of the road towards our common goal, it is blocked with political barbed wires, like a divisive petition for recall for just a “supportive”—not key—position of leadership in the province?
Certainly, at this moment in our history, there is need for a more united effort to push this financially beleaguered country over the hump. We need more politically divisive issues like we need a bullet hole in the head.
Truth to tell, the leaders we need today all over the country should be people who can work together as one to attain an economic development capable of feeding an ever growing population—86 million at latest estimate.
Unless our leaders are able to do this, this little republic we call our own is headed for real trouble. According to estimates from a group of economists at the University of the Philippines, two years is long enough before we would become a truly penurious nation.
There is a sense of hopelessness that seem to hang over our country today, a feeling that there is really no future that we can look forward to over the short term, and no vision we can strive for over the long term.
This is the view of an old retiree we met a few days ago. He said this is the kind of pessimism that breeds trouble among our people who belong to the so-called working class. If it were not for the fact communism is already a discredited ideology, he fears it would now succeed in this environment.
The palpable discontent of the average wage earners in urban centers could bee seen in the way they talk about the difficulties they encounter in making “both ends meet” every day.
A taxi driver yesterday complained that the incessant increase in the pump price of gasoline and the reluctance of taxi proprietors to even reduce the daily rental of their taxi units under the excuse of an also rising prices of spare parts, gives the drivers take home shares barely enough to let the family have three meals and send the kids to school.
As my elderly acquaintance, a retired private high school teacher, summing up the present national condition, said: “It is belt-tightening time.”
(September 18, 2004 issue)
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