A nation without hope?

These past weeks and months, this columnist has ambled into a number of coffee shops, hotel lobbies, diplomatic receptions, combo cafes, banking establishments and whatnot, meeting of course people, mostly middle or upper middle class. More than three years ago, virtually the same people celebrated the Centennial, the onset of the 21st century with great pomp and flourish. They were hitched to the stars. But more so they were hitched to a great, big, rolling, gleaming wagon of hope. The wagon trail at the time looked like a promising spiral. The nation would climb that spiral with grit and audacity.

There was so much hope. The Filipino would prevail. Who could stop him? He had talent, genius. He had everything.

Now meeting the same people again, one is stuck by the deepening pessimism. The magic of the Centennial has gone. The faces that greeted the year 2000 with the glad cry of would-be pioneers who would transform the 21st century into some kind of political Shangri-La have fallen. Their language has lost its muscular, hopeful lilt. Now they look at the Philippines as some kind of stricken ship fallen on the shoals of a wayward sea. It’s no longer Shelley’s "If winter comes, can spring be far behind?" It’s Carl Sandburg’s "Hope is an echo, hope ties itself yonder, yonder." Yonder.

These people in the year 2000 never dreamt their hopes would disintegrate this early. Now many of them tell me they are planning, they and their families, to leave for abroad. Not for them really because they are well secured financially, but the kids. Often you hear these remarks: "We don’t want the kids to grow in an atmosphere of graft and corruption, where crooks abound, where there are no values. Where morality has disappeared. There is so much crime, so much violence. There is no leader who can come to our rescue. Almost everybody up there is a thief and a crook."

Where were they going to migrate? The first priority of course was America. But the US was no longer the end-all and be-all. They could go to Canada (Vancouver and Toronto were often mentioned) or to Australia (Sydney, Melbourne) and New Zealand. The thing was to escape, they said. That gave me the creeps. I had never thought of escaping. The fight, the battle, the great big convulsion if any would be here, on Filipino sod. And I, if still alive by then, would look for my little foxhole.

But was it that bad?

Here, the conversation would often grate to a stop. Most Filipinos, I think, do not want to confront their future in terms of bloodletting. Or a great upheaval. We are a people of tropical gestures. We don’t want blood on our hands. We are also a people resigned to God. Between the two we fashion a language that avoids extremes, that climbs branches like squirrels but never the top of the big tree where we might see an oncoming deluge. And so the expressions like "God will provide", "God will not forget us", "What will be will be". Even the communist left no longer talks about Armaggedon. War and peace has mutated into a language of squiggly double-talk. Each side is unwilling to unsheathe the sword and plunge the nation into the twilight of the gods. There must be a way. There is a way.

When I met Ninoy Aquino in Boston in July 1983, his too was the language of hope.

He told me this was why he would return to the Philippines to "give the Filipino hope". He was superbly confident of his role in history. Unto the nation, he would be a hero. A kind of savior. He was what Philip Dick said: "This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people, they would say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequence of this resistance." Except that Ninoy was no ordinary man. He was into the mold of his real heroes, Jose Rizal and Mahatma Gandhi. And, unconsciously, unwittingly, Ninoy sought to die like them, a blood drop from every pore, until the end came with a musical blast of Gotterdamerung.

Ferdinand Marcos understood and misunderstood Ninoy.

He sought to prevent Ninoy from undergoing heart surgery at Baylor Medical Center, Dallas, Texas. But he also knew if he kept Ninoy here, who refused to be operated on at Imelda’s Heart Center, Ninoy would die in his cell in Fort Bonifacio. And this would be blamed on him. So when Aquino bolted Boston August 1983 to return to Manila, the dictator was in a bind. If he allowed Ninoy back, either on house arrest terms or back to his Fort Bonifacio cell, Ninoy would flare like a sputtering fuse. He was, Marcos feared, the only man who could ignite the nation to mutiny or rebellion.

On the other hand, if the decision would be to murder Ninoy even before he could step on Filipino soil, then he, Ferdinand Marcos, who prided himself on never having lost a political battle, would jam his hand on the hole of the dike. The walls would shudder but they would hold. A dead Ninoy without his voice held little fear for the dictator. What indeed was Ninoy without his drumroll voice? Without the words that escaped his mouth like bullets, words that could ignite an entire nation, Ninoy six feet under would soon be forgotten by the citizenry.

This was where Mr. Marcos miscalculated.

A dead Ninoy, assassinated by the dictatorship, gave life to the nation. Nonetheless, the nation could not rise to the full stature of the dead hero. When it did, it was in a long series of street demonstrations, all the way toi the staging of the snap presidential elections in February 1986. EDSA was a street upheaval, not a revolution in the real sense of the word. So, unlike the French revolution of July 14, 1789, People Power did not settle scores. Nobody was guillotined, lashed to the mast. There was no equivalent of the seizure of the Bastille. With that seizure, the monarchy fell. The French capitalist bourgeoisie lit the skies with their triumph, and the whole world was never the same after that. Liberté, egalité, fraternité.

Not so in the Philippines. The only thing that fell was the Marcos dictatorship. There was no disruption or toppling of a social class. Eventually the whole establishment of patronage politics, the comprador system, the cronies and their toadies, the brigands and buccaneers of our façade democracy, its pimps and its prostitutes, its mercenary troubadours, its belly dancers and pom-pom bailarinas were back. The elite was back. And the elite hadn’t changed. Lee Kwan Yew looked at our democracy and he was abashed. He saw fiesta and frolic instead of blood, sweat and tears, a struggling for the heights. He saw our elections not as a pouring into great decisions but an excuse for time-wasting exuberance. Mostly, the same crooked croupiers were elected back to office.

The nation danced and had a good time. It was not a nation up to its neck in work, in a mad drive to progress and prosper. It had no discipline and Lee Kwan Yew said so. President Fidel Ramos bridled. He argued back lamely and irrationally that discipline in the Philippines would have to come from below.

Will the nation dance again in 2004? Will the elections be the same old excuse for smothering the air with same old pledges and promises? Will the polls keep hope aloft, or whatever there is left of hope? Will Ninoy Aquino be finally interred, 20 years after he slumped dead into the airport tarmac from a soldier’s bullet? Or will his ghost remain? And his special voice issue through the darkness? Or is there a chance the 2004 elections will open a slit into the future, through which great and meaningful reforms can pass?

Again hope. Again the possibility. No matter how remote, an unsung hero will break the crust.

The supreme irony is that it’s people, it’s personalities, it’s the grandees of society hogging today’s headlines. Danding Cojuangco, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, Sen. Panfilo Lacson, Sen. Noli de Castro, Sen. Loren Legarda, not to mention of course Fernando Poe Jr. are up there in continuing bursts of propaganda and confetti, all sound and fury signifying nothing as the great Bard of Avon said. To imagine that any of them can save Philippine society is to imagine the pyramids of Egypt can be borne aloft by the hunchback of Notre Dame, Quasimodo.

If nobody can, what awaits the nation beyond 2004?

Catastrophe, maybe. But what kind of catastrophe? A forest chopped into branches and twigs? Asian’s new killing fields wrapped into the political wunderkind of George W. Bush – international terrorism? But maybe a miracle will happen? Jaime Cardinal sin would always tell us that when despair took the floor: "Don’t worry. A miracle will happen. God will not allow the Philippines to collapse." Really?

So is that all we are left with – a miracle? Many people did, but I didn’t believe the two EDSAs were miracle. I prefer hope or what is left of hope. If God is there, he will give us courage, intelligence, the primal scream, and the weapons to slay the nation’s enemies. Venga.