Filipinos should uplift their purposes and paradigms

While other countries are looking at strategic and long-range purposes, the Filipinos sadly remain myopic, distracted, lacking in a sense of loftier purposes. While other peoples look at the bigger picture and focus on more important things, Filipinos talk of feuds among the Barretos and make ''tsismis'' on the trivial issue of separate toilets for gays and lesbians.

I came home from a month-long sabbatical leave in some European countries. And what I found when I landed again in this cradle of noble heroes, this land of my birth are headlines about the torrid feud among the Barretos, newspaper columns for and against Marjorie, Gretchen and Claudine. Even the name of the president was unnecessarily dragged into the ruckus, and Atong Ang, Recom Echiverri and Tony Boy Cojuangco. What are the relevance of the Barretos to the problems besetting the whole nation? What has been the contribution of Atong Ang to the national economy ? And what has Recom Echiverri done as a politician to alleviate the sufferings of the people? Why do we care about the love life of the Barreto sisters? Do they deserve our time, effort and attention? They are, with due respect, impertinent, irrelevant and immaterial to the social, economic and political problems of the Philippines.

Other countries focus on managing their population, addressing the problems of public health and education,  solving unemployment, and making sure that their citizens have adequate and decent housing, affordable medical and hospital facilities. Their legislative bodies spend time and efforts to formulate value-adding policies and laws that shall push the countries forward in a highly competitive global market. Here, our Congressmen allocate for themselves multi-billions of pork barrel, call it by other names and deny their surreptitious insertions into the national budget. Here our local government politicians go abroad, on unabated junkets, under the guise of learning from other countries, while they travel with their wives, mistresses or both, at the expense of the peoples' taxes.

Other nations are concentrated on defending every inch of their territories, maintaining peace and order and making sure that all nationals and visitors are safe from external aggression and from internal subversion. They train their soldiers including men and women and even children and instill in them discipline and loyalty to country and respect for the rule of law, as well as respect for persons in authority. Here, the persons in authority are the ones violating the laws. They kill their plebes and neophytes while in schools and they give examples of corruptions even inside the national penitentiary. Generals are accused of making millions from drug lords, while they slap their junior officers for show, via national TV, and jail their subordinates for submitting defective liquidation reports involving a few pesos.

What kind of nation and people have we become, even as we claim to be the only Catholic country in Asia for the last 500 years?