The Philippines is an archipelago situated in the tropics near the equator. As such, it helped develop the bodies and minds of the native people inhabiting the islands into thinking that the Providence and Mother Nature swallows everything but also gives everything all the same. While typhoons, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are routine, violent, destructive and deadly, these are always followed for the most part by long episodes of environmental subsistence and reliance.
The average Filipino is the true embodiment of Juan Tamad, or Lazy John as the pretentious Anglophones might prefer to call, a folk character who would rather wait forever for the fruit from a high branch to fall to the ground than pick it up himself, knowing that the tropical environment always provides basic sustenance and permeats laziness and complacency.
Such mindset is however unsuitable for the complexities of the modern world. A community that deals with political corruption required systems so complex and complicated that it demands a powerful mind and years of study to truly understand and figure out how a wholly functioning society truly works. Living in the tropics near the equator fries the brain into laziness and complacency, and this what had led to the existence of the Philippine political dynasties in the first place, corrupt as they were, doing little to nothing to improve the country’s lot in the expectation that they can simply feed off the country’s coffers while having to do little at all. The masses, the electorate, are just as guilty, after all, being a liberal democracy, the politicians are representative of what the masses truly are: a people reliant on the environment surrounding them to provide them sustenance and, if necessary, wealth, without having to do anything at all.
To ask whether or not the Philippines can somehow address political corruption without having to suffer the upheaval Nepal has recently experienced is straight up stupidity. Philippines had always experienced upheavals, from protests to outright revolutions, one of which would make the ouster of the Ceausescus in Romania look like a nursery school in comparison. One has failed to take into account that the Philippines has always existed as a failed state on par with Afghanistan and Somalia but as a democratic institution, and such disorder that Nepal just faced is a sight the Filipinos are all too familiar to see.
This happened just two days ago from the day this answer was first posted. An upcoming rally involving supporters of the Dutertes claimed that theirs would be bigger than this, though how large it will actually be, only time will tell.
But the fact still remains that while Filipinos love to protest and rail up against corruption, it was they who themselves are guilty of such practices, first from childhood parasitism of relying on periodic godparents’ gifts and pasalubong from working parents, through the habit of engaging in sweepstaking while munching in subsidies from 4P’s and drinking it out with alcohol and call it a day, up to straight up mendicancy by begging alms in the street by the numbers, further showing how tropics-based providence lifestyle had deeply ingrained in the minds of every Filipino and therefore perpetuating the never-ending cycle of political corruption in the islands despite countless uprisings that had taken place against it.
No comments:
Post a Comment