No country can have a working democracy if it lacks its essential ingredients. From the lesson of our own failed democracy, those ingredients are financial security, physical-mental health and education of all its citizens. We have been perennially ruled by a wealthy elite for the very reason that more than half of our population are financially insecure (a euphemism for poor), have no access to affordable health care and barely educated, if at all. It is not democracy that the majority does not even have a voice in government.
The poverty of millions of Filipinos needs no proof. Unemployment is high and many of those who are employed are not getting a living wage, not even the minimum wage. Many people have to risk working for foreigners abroad to get the living wages their countrymen would not give them.
The inadequacy of our health system was of late aptly proven by Sen. Bong Go’s topping the election due to the popularity of his Malasakit Centers. The cost of medicines, not to mention hospitalization, is just so prohibitive that the poor are happy to access Malasakit Centers. Of course, they can still run to their elected officials for help with their medical bills in exchange for their votes in the next elections.
The poor results of Filipino students in international science, math, and literacy tests do not demonstrate the dysfunctionality of our education system as much as the corrupt and self-serving leaders the country’s institutions of learning produce. Among other non-developmental and possibly corrupt decisions of these miseducated leaders, they’d rather completely modernize the armed forces than budget funds for Phil Health and provide the educational system with enough funds to accommodate all school-age children in the country’s basic schools.
Only humans are capable of acquiring knowledge that could enhance their welfare. Beasts are prisoners of whatever life-circumstance they are thrown into. The measure, therefore, of a person’s education is his use of knowledge to improve the human condition. Unfortunately, by that measure many of our elected government officials can hardly be considered educated.
Also in our culture we go to school to get a job. Many pursue higher education to get to a higher pay grade and not for the “independent thought,” the “critical thinking” and the “pursuit of truth” that are the lofty goals of education.
As a consequence, an elite few have a field day dominating us. Overcome by a feeling of utter helplessness, many of us are content to depend on ayuda-dispensing political leaders, never daring to speak up, to protest or to demand for services we have a right to.
The late President Manuel L. Quezon once famously declared his preference for a “Philippines run like hell by Filipinos” over a “Philippines run like heaven by Americans.” Well, we are getting exactly that, a country run like hell by Filipinos. Philippine independence, which we celebrate tomorrow, June 12, is heaven to the successors of our colonial masters but hell to the latter’s subjects who as the majority are supposed to be the rulers in a democracy.