Stay rooted in the past and stagnate

The Philippines will never truly attain the progress it so richly deserves if it stays rooted in its martial law past. A quick look-around will readily give us at least two examples of countries with ugly and terrible pasts that have since progressed tremendously because they have been able to deal pragmatically and maturely with the trauma of their tragic experiences.

Germany has had its Hitler, hands-down far more hated globally than Marcos, and the Holocaust, during which more than six million Jews were exterminated. Japan had its Emperor Hirohito who, while insulated from politics and was highly revered, was nevertheless complicit in that country's expansionist plans to subjugate East Asia, and which came crashing down in a crushing defeat after getting nuked at a cost of tens of thousands.

Germany endured partition by the conquering Allied powers and Japan political administration by the United States. Once freed from the yoke of foreign supervision, and humbled yet strengthened by aid and reparations, both countries spurted forward without looking back. Germany and Japan today are two of the world's leading economies.

And then there is us, the Philippines. To be sure, prior to the pandemic, we have had our economic gains, largely private sector driven. And that is precisely it. We have moved somewhat forward because the private sector is apolitical. Your political views, simplified into hate-Marcos/love-Marcos sentiments are never a requirement for employment, promotion or other advancement. Many top CEOs and taipans today are quietly pro-Marcos.

But business is business. In business, it is bad business not to sell your product or service to anyone on account of his political sentiments. If you can pay then you can have the product. Thankfully that recent ill-advised attempt to boycott a restaurant because the owner was pro-Marcos was quickly nipped in the bud. Allow politics to throw a wrench into the economy and we all become monkeys, you know, screaming on each other's backs.

Right now we are in the midst of another political exercise that is getting uglier by the day. And all because the anti-Marcos segment of Philippine society has never allowed itself to be grounded in the reality that the world was never meant to be a uniformity, that just as there are people who are against Marcos, there will always be those who are for him.

That is the way of the world. Boy, girl; rich, poor; big, small; pretty, ugly. We can go on enumerating about difference and diversity till kingdom come. Those who insist on a unitary and elitist anti-Marcos society, calling those who do not think and feel the same as stupid, ignorant, revisionist, corrupt, killers, are hypocrites and bigots.

Allowing hypocrites and bigots to take the helm of this nation, or any nation for that matter, is the surest way to send that nation to hell. No country can ever survive a leadership unwilling to accept the realities of its environment. It will eventually crash as a failed state, regardless of an economy that might be humming.

Such leadership can be likened to the intolerant Taliban, which wants to go back, not forward. Such unforgiving intolerance is very unchristian. The bedrock of Christianity is forgiveness. Christ gave his life so sins will be forgiven. The anti-Marcos forces think themselves better judges than Christ. They will have a lot to answer for when their own time for judgment is up. I end this with religion because that is the last chance for this country.