The protest actions held by various groups the other day predictably showed efforts by some leaders to seize the narrative regarding the rampant corruption in the bureaucracy that resulted in the loss of trillions of pesos in anomalous infrastructure and flood control projects throughout the country. The people are angry but they are also hungry for directions on how to solve the problem.
This reminds me of my close but short encounter with these money-making schemes from the top to bottom of the government bureaucracy. I was amazed at how money can be had from even such boring tasks as a government official instructing an underling to buy fruits and dried fish that he would gift a visiting superior in order to ingratiate himself to the said superior. The underling makes money even as his boss succeeds in ingratiating himself to his boss by giving him the “pasalubong.”
That experience told me how to view government spending and the values of people in the bureaucracy. The longer the years spent in the bureaucracy, the more adept, creative and shamefaced one can also be in making money out of every task, no matter how ordinary or minor it is. That’s why I still could not see an end to the vicious cycle no matter how frequent and how big the protest actions that we hold are.
Pardon the pessimism, but I reckon that even in communist countries corruption still exists in the government bureaucracy. The joke is that people are normally not strict in spending money that is not their own. And that punishment for stealing a can of milk is even heavier than stealing millions of pesos from government coffers.
I call this a vicious cycle because it is what it is: a cycle. The current brouhaha comes just a few years removed from the “PDAF scam” that also became a hot topic in the country in the past. And remember the money amassed by the dictatorship of the “real Macoy,” meaning Ferdinand Marcos Sr., aka Bongbong Marcos’s father? The cycle has continued from president to president.
Frankly, I don’t really know how we can solve this problem. When I was younger, I thought I could change the world for the better. But looking back, I have realized that working for societal change would in the end be futile. The best thing to do is to start the change with ourselves because in the end, the only people that we can control are, yes, ourselves.
I won’t say that holding protest actions is not needed. We have to show to the world from time to time that we do not condone corruption, especially in the bureaucracy. But we should not invest too much in those actions. If change does not come immediately, we should not feel discouraged or become depressed. Accept that there are things in this world that can’t easily be changed. The cycle of corruption needs to be met with a cycle of protest actions. And we should not feel discouraged when the hoped-for change does not come. Constancy is how drops of water can eventually reshape hard granite. And for man, constancy requires patience.