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Saturday, January 01, 2005
Roperos: The first day
By Godofredo M. Roperos
Politics Also
It’s like going on a long hike up and down a chain of mountain peaks, each peak being a year of our time. At the top of each, we pause to celebrate with a bang the moment of successful conquest. It’s an exhilarating pause that leaves us little time to think what to do next, when we have to take the first step down the other side of the mountain.
It is downhill the first day of the new walk as we measure our remaining strength after the struggle of the previous climb. What was yesterday is past, and what is tomorrow is unknown. But we have long learned to use yesterday to define tomorrow, and to act in accord with the perceived definition.
In most instances, where politics is concerned, the definition is anchored on political self-preservation. Consequently, “continuity” is established and what was yesterday may have to continue tomorrow.
Assessing our present against the successes and failures of the recent past is what the initial downhill hike of the New Year should usually be, as possible needs and demands of the future are weighed against the resources and capabilities on hand.
I do not wish, though, to touch on the first day and the first step most of us take on the personal plain. On my part, the reason is quite obvious. Resolutions made at this point in our hike are usually laid aside after the first dozen steps. Don’t look at me amusingly now, or I’ll be tempted to believe you, too, is guilty of such self-betrayal.
But there’s need to focus this time on the overall condition of our city and country. It is very clear that we left as of midnight last night a circumstance in Cebu that has pushed the city’s leadership to adopt radical measures to contain the brewing problem as nobody had ever done before.
At the national level, it appears that we have a leader that packs a lot of words and promises but no action and fulfillment. Instead of being action-oriented, she instead has become reactive, spending more time parrying punches from critics and detractors instead of making the punches themselves.
As a result, at a time when we needed an inspiring leadership and a creative and progressive visionary, we are offered instead weak-kneed governance that usually back-pedals after initiating ineffective counter-punches that fail to connect.
So, now, as this nation and its people make the first step on the first day of the New Year, we have a fiscal crisis that is still hanging over our heads, an unstable economy that has generated a runaway inflation, and a population that threatens to double in a decade, control of which is mired in a political issue between church and state.
And finally, there is the overall national condition that portrays a nation overburdened with problems of governance that are essentially the making of the collective behavior of individual leaders. The continuing corruption and graft in all levels of government, and the never-ending political power struggle for personal gain s are symptoms of a political malady.
Yet, there is still no reason for us to despair. After the downhill hike from today’s first step, our leaders and our people could agree really to join hands and undertake a new direction for the succeeding steps toward the next mountain peak in the distance.
(January 1, 2005 issue)
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