The new century is now a decade down. History is now a decade longer; our lives a decade less.
When we embarked on this new century, we were hopeful. Information technology was a juggernaut, the messiah of a new age. New economies would emerge, we thought, and mankind’s long struggle with misery will make great strides forward.
That hopefulness was not unfounded. New economies did emerge but they created new challenges. Poverty was diminished in some places; increased in others.
I imagine the commencement of decades, especially after truly tormented ones, are characterized by an ounce more hope than usual.
After the end of World War I, and a League of Nations was formed to “end all wars”, the mood at the start of the twenties was celebratory. The decade to be known as the “Roaring Twenties” ended in the Great Depression.
The sixties drew to a close with man finally landing on the moon. The seventies thus began with great expectations over what technology will achieve for humanity. Today, we remember that decade as one of wars, dictatorships and genocides.
Things do not always turn out as we expect at the doorsteps of decades. We started this dying decade with great millennial hopes. The UN embarked on a millennium development program intending to redeploy some of the world’s great wealth to finally bring down poverty. Yet, on hindsight, this seems destined to be remembered as the decade of international terror, with September 11, 2001 as climax and that Christmas Day attempt to bomb a Northwest Airline flight coming into Detroit as denouement.
We started this last decade with the morning-after effects of the Asian financial crisis. We closed it with the last aftershocks of a recession whose severity across the globe was second only to the Great Depression.
We began this last decade expectant of the revolutionary effects of information technology on our lifestyle. We close this decade with dire warnings about climate change and calls for a revolutionary change in our lifestyle — doing more with less and mitigating the course of self-destruction caused by unmitigated carbon emissions.
In this country, we began this decade convinced a presidency has failed. That government was subsequently ousted. Today, we seem even more convinced that, because of design flaws in the Constitution, no presidency can succeed.
The first decade of this new millennium was not kind to us in these islands.
Our economy grew uninterruptedly for the most part. But there was not enough growth to lift us from the basket of sick economies. There was not enough quality in that growth to stem the rising flood of poverty.
High poverty levels produce a disappointed people and a desperate civic culture that looks to the public sector for relief — either by the dubious boon of subsidies or the demeaning network of patronage or the debilitating methods of graft.
Our political culture was perverted by this high degree of disappointment. Political blocks tried to mobilize rage or organize around disdain. Our politics became controversy-driven, scandal-marred. It was characterized by anger mismanagement: the ability to use public disgust as a weapon to constantly assault our institutions.
There was, to be sure, enough raw material to fuel this sort of destructive politicking. For nearly the length of the decade, we saw no respite from partisan mudslinging, coup plotting and constant agitation against everything.
The year we close today was particularly harsh for most Filipinos. We endured destructive calamities on top of an almost stagnant economy struggling to stave off the recession that hit most other economies in the world.
But it was also a year where outstanding individuals conserved out faith in ourselves. Manny Pacquiao made us proud. Efren Peñaflorida showed the world we can produce heroes as well. In a recent television poll asking viewers who the year’s biggest newsmaker was, nearly half the respondents cast their votes for singing sensation Charice Pempengco.
The fact the diminutive lady with a powerful singing voice towered over everybody else — political heroines, public officials and business tycoons — tells us much about the popular culture. It is a popular culture that, in a most determined manner, focuses away from the misery and false prophets, from politics in general and those who pose as redeemers in particular.
As we move into the second decade of this new millennium, the sense of things a-changing is sharpened by the fact of elections forthcoming.
To be sure, all of us are expectant of changed circumstances for the nation. No one truly opposes change and no one is truly fearful of it.
But we do not have a consensus on what sort of change is really good for us and what type of change is really manageable. It is easy for most of us to be drawn to rhetoric about new beginnings. It is not as easy for most of us to imagine the work that needs to be done and the sacrifices to be made in order to build a more functional social order.
The liveliness of our electoral politics nearly guarantees that the popular imagination of the change our society needs will be commandeered by the most visible political players — until all notion of change is reduced to something trite, like being for or against this or that person.
There is danger there. We could lose sight of the grandness of the challenge of changing our society to make it a more responsive one, to make our institutions more adequate to the demands of a new time, to evolve appropriate forms of leadership at all levels of our public life so that we all truly move forward rather than just run in place.
H