Fixing ourselves? Ask the right questions!

I’ve been out of Cebu for more than two weeks now, flying the other week to Beijing to cover the formal opening of the Philippine Tourism Office with Tourism Secretary Roberto "Obet" Pagdanganan and meeting Philippine Ambassador Willy Gaa, a good friend of my golf crony, Jake Marques. Now we’re here in the United States at the tail-end of a four-day conference and to some spend time with our old friends, Filipinos who found the greener pastures of the United States, sharing the so-called "American dream."

That’s exactly what I’ve been pondering while we were taking that 12-hour long plane ride from Manila to LAX. It would have been easier to write another travelogue; after all, there’s a lot to write about that here in the US. But right now, I’d rather dabble in a little soul-searching and pose the question that all Filipinos should ask: What really is the Filipino dream?

Pundits are ever ready to poke fun at ourselves that the Filipino dream really is to get a green card from the US Embassy and leave this country. But then, that’s still the same as sharing the American dream… and to achieve that, one is required to have a green card, otherwise you fall into another category… the lower caste called "Tago-ng-tago" a.k.a. TNT, which only the desperadoes would dare. If you dig deeper, one can say that the Filipino dream is to have a good life with his family right here at home… but the only problem is, he just can’t achieve that dream, especially the majority of those still caught in the vicious cycle of poverty and the quickest way out is via the Filipino Diaspora!

Indeed, there are more than eight million Filipinos who are everywhere on this earth, except the Philippines, eking out a living. We’re not saying that they are better off financially, but one can say that most of them are in a better state than being back home. Now if we believe that the other countries need their services, it can only mean that the kind of work they do is either not found in the Philippines or if they are here, the pay is so marginal, they’d still end up lost inside that cycle of poverty. There really is no choice for these people.

It’s for this reason that truck driver Angelo de la Cruz drove for Iraq rather than here, that teachers, nurses or caregivers work abroad… because they do exactly the same things, except that they’re not doing it here back home, and best of all, the pay is great, especially when you convert it from the dollar to the peso. That’s why we know that more often than not, the fluctuation in the peso to the dollar rate can be traced to Filipinos remitting money from countries abroad. Some pundits look at our Diaspora as a curse; I look at it as an opportunity… that someday, we can be better than what we are today.

This brings us to the million-dollar question: "How do we fix the Philippines?" But is this the right question to ask? A month ago, I attended a forum on Population Growth and the Path to Poverty sponsored by the Asia Policy Center with the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation in Cebu City, and our lecturers took turns in telling us that our unchecked population growth has resulted in more Filipinos languishing in poverty. No argument there.

But of course, I dared to tell these thinkers that having more people than what your land mass can take doesn’t necessarily lead to poverty and the best example is Japan, where there’s so many people living in one square kilometer vis-à-vis Ethiopia, for instance. However, one statement that struck me was that whatever studies that the Population Commission or the others have done since the 70s have already been presented to our national leaders, from President Ferdinand Marcos to President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo… but yet no one has dared to check our population growth. So is this our only problem?

Maybe we should ask a different question like who can fix the Philippines or since we have elected President Arroyo, can she fix what’s wrong with the Philippines? In Hong Kong, I bought the New York Times best-selling book by Bernard Lewis entitled, "What Went Wrong?" It’s a historical discussion of the clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East. Though I haven’t finished reading the book, it brings me back to what we’ve said so many times in the past that for a nation to move forward, we should look at the past. I remember what my good friend, former Deputy Speaker and incoming Justice Secretary Raul Gonzales, once told me that in an edifice in Washington D.C. is emblazoned, "The Past is Prologue."

Well, we have so often quoted Barbara Tuchman who quipped "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat them." For author Bernard Lewis, to have a keen understanding of why the Muslims are so restless to the point that their extremist groups resort to terrorism, flying commercial planes into the World Trade Center or grabbing an ordinary truck driver like Angelo de la Cruz to hold a nation hostage, then we must dig deeper as to what happened in the past so we can have a better understanding of why Muslim extremists are doing this.

But we’re not here to discuss the book of Bernard Lewis, which we’ll use as reference in future articles, but he does ask the right questions that we Filipinos ought to ask ourselves. To paraphrase Lewis, he asks What are we doing wrong and what are they doing right? Then we go to the next, How do we right the wrongs we’re in?" Let me point out that we’re not offering solutions to what ails this nation, rather we should concentrate on asking the right questions and later on, find the best solution to solve whatever is wrong with us!

Once we’ve asked the right questions, then allow me to quote Sen. Robert Kennedy, "Some men see things as they are and say, Why? I dream of things that never were and say, Why not?" Traveling is a favorite pastime of our political leaders and let me point out that during the Middle Ages, when a country was left behind in trade or technology, the King or Emir usually sent out agents to travel far and wide to find out what the others were doing to copy them. At this point, all I can say is there are better systems of governance in this country and all we need to do is copy them, then someday we can say we’ve fixed this nation for the better!

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For e-mail responses to this article, write to [email protected]. Bobit Avila’s columns can also be accessed through www.thefreeman.com. He also hosts a weekly talk show, "Straight from the Sky," shown every Monday, at 8 p.m., only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 of SkyCable.