Beautiful

Beautiful – INQ7.net is my column for today.

What ails the USA

In , Stratfor analyzes what’s going wrong with the USA (as in US Army). Very interesting reading.

Debt crisis paper

UPSE Discussion Papers extra. extra, read all about it! The UP School of Economics paper on the public debt crisis-to-be.

Basic solutions

Basic solutions – INQ7.net is my column for today.

Remembering Ninoy

Remembering Ninoy – INQ7.net is my column for today.

Ethics in the media

You can read the full text of a recent speech by Teddyboy Locsin here: ABS-CBNNEWS.COM

Among his more pungent thoughts:

I would hazard that the mass media keeps committing ethical breaches because it is so intimately a part of the society it mirrors. The general moral decline of society is not a development that the media can arrest but a fate it must necessarily share. Media has never risen higher than the public it panders to — except on those rare occasions when it rises to the level of patriotism; such as the Propaganda Movement that drove out Spain; the campaign that committed the US to our independence; underground press that kept alive the spirit of anti-Japanese resistance and the anti-Marcos martial law struggle when the media rose above its nature to become not a mirror of society but an object of its respect.

People tend to lower their ethical standards because they look at morality not as an absolute criterion but as a national mean: if the majority of the people have low scores in upright living, then the national passing score must be lowered. The bad don’t sink in moral terms without dragging everyone else down with them — especially when, by being bad, they seem to materially profit.

That leads to my second conclusion. The tendency to adopt a flexible or “de goma� set of norms partly springs from the fact that everywhere they look, people see the gatekeepers, the rule-makers, violating the norms more egregiously than all the rest, whether it is a priest playing with the sacristan, the politician playing fast and loose with the rules he makes, the public official engaged in plunder, the journalist, publisher and editor who best exemplify the corruption they denounce.

All of these elements, while working separately, together contribute to the massive national rot they should be fighting against rather than adding to.

This process of building up rot has gone on for decades and has resulted in the steady lowering of the national bar of morals.

Quezon Service Cross

The President conferred the Quezon Service Cross on the late Benigno S. Aquino, Jr. today, during the mass marking the anniversary of his death held by his tomb.

The Quezon Service Cross is the highest civilian award of the Republic of the Philippines.

Created by Joint Resolution No. 4 dated October 21, 1946 of the First Congress of the Republic of the Philippines, the Quezon Service Cross is a Decoration conferred by the President of the Philippines with the concurrence of the Congress of the Philippines on Filipino citizens for exemplary service to the nation in such a manner and such a degree as to add great prestige to the Republic of the Philippines, or as to contribute to the lasting benefit of its people.

Ninoy Aquino is only the fourth Filipino to be conferred the Quezon Service Cross. The other awardees are: Carlos P. Romulo, Emilio Aguinaldo, and Ramon Magsaysay (posthumous). The award is rarely given because of the extremely strict criteria for awarding, and because the award requires the concurrence of both houses of Congress.

Luz Magsaysay

A beautiful and poignant editorial on the passing of First Lady Luz Magsaysay can be read here: ABS-CBNNEWS.COM

Nationalism

Nationalism – INQ7.net is my column for today.

The Long View: Nationalism

Nationalism

First posted 01:59:37 (Mla time) August 19, 2004
Manuel L. Quezon III

Inquirer News Service

AFTER THE MASSACRE at Amritsar, Mahatma Gandhi said to British officials led by the viceroy of India: “I beg you to accept that there is no people on earth who wouldn’t prefer their own bad government to the good government of an alien power.”

About 10 years earlier, a Filipino said basically the same thing: “I prefer a government run like hell by Filipinos to a government run like heaven by Americans.” It was a sound bite heard around the world. But what all too few recalled was the essential sentence that came next: “Because, however bad a Filipino government might be, we can always change it.”

To this day, there are Filipinos who, whenever something goes wrong, cackle and say, “Look, Quezon got his wish. We have a government run like hell!” As if it is something uniquely Quezonian-and Filipino-to want to run our own lives, badly as the case may be, rather than entrust it to the guidance of foreigners.

What Quezon and Gandhi said roughly a decade apart is the essence of nationalism: a people, a nation, must have the chance to make good and bad decisions, because there is simply no substitute for decisions made for one’s self, by one’s self. Government will not always be good, leaders will not always be the best, but in the end, a government and its leaders must be selected by the people and no one else. Love of country, nationalism, requires that a people have the freedom both to make mistakes and achieve great things. After all, the lives of individuals as well as nations require learning, and one cannot learn without, at times, doing wrong or making mistakes. Surely it is better to make one’s own mistakes, to collectively endure errors of one’s choosing, rather than undertake the same risks at the direction of a colonial power.

Nationalism is not my country, right or wrong, or everything for my countrymen at the expense of all aliens, but rather a more fundamental appreciation that one belongs to a people who have a country, and that the destiny of that country is in the hands of a people free to make errors but at the same time rectify their mistakes. It involves a sense of stewardship over a particular territory that geography and history have made the primary responsibility of no one else on earth but those who inhabit that territory.

When, as a child, I first asked what nationalism meant, I was simply told, “It means love of country.” There are many kinds of love, as we all discover as we grow up, but fundamental to understanding love is that it requires a sense of self-worth and dignity. You cannot love and be loved, first of all, if you do not love yourself. And you cannot love properly if your love is the kind that is dependent merely on the approval of others, or measured by what you might believe to be the superior love of others. To love one’s country is to love one’s land and people with all their flaws, despite all their wrongs; and to maintain, at the same time, a conviction that one’s love for nation and nationhood will result in a better, stronger country.

As a child, every Aug. 19, I would look at the statue of Quezon in Letran and wonder what it was he was portrayed as being in the act of saying. Eventually I asked one Dominican, who looked at me sternly and thundered, “He is saying, ‘I love the Philippines!’” And the answer satisfied me.

Many years later, I came across a recording of one of Quezon’s speeches, and it is the only one I have committed to memory both due to its brevity and its being to the point. The speech was recorded in the 1920s, when he was first diagnosed with tuberculosis and assumed he didn’t have much longer to live. It goes like this:

“My fellow citizens: there is one thought I want you always to bear in mind. And that is: that you are Filipinos. That the Philippines are your country, and the only country God has given you. That you must keep it for yourselves, for your children, and for your children’s children, until the world is no more. You must live for it, and die for it, if necessary.

“Your country is a great country. It has a great past, and a great future. The Philippines of yesterday are consecrated by the sacrifices of lives and treasure of your patriots, martyrs, and soldiers. The Philippines of today are honored by the wholehearted devotion to its cause of unselfish and courageous statesmen. The Philippines of tomorrow will be the country of plenty, of happiness, and of freedom. A Philippines with her raised in the midst of the West Pacific, mistress of her own destiny, holding in her hand the torch of freedom and democracy. A republic of virtuous and righteous men and women all working together for a better world than the one we have at present.”

These are the basics we often overlook, but which are the requirements for true love of country: A sense of identity. A sense of belonging. A sense of responsibility and accountability to the past, to the present, and to the future. Most of all, a dream of a country that is no one’s but our own, and for which we must always retain the fondest dreams to inspire us as we go about our daily lives.

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