Philippine's experiment in nationhood
Philippine's experiment in nationhood
MANILA: At a time when a gang of hostage-takers defines the international image of the Philippines, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that our experiment in nationhood is itself hostage to circumstance. Even today's official celebration of Independence Day -- a simple affair determined in part by the new government's budgetary discipline -- is a study in straightened circumstances. There is an almost palpable air of what the philosophers call contingency, a resigned sense that we are in this state of affairs not by choice but by circumstance.
Today is a good day to remind ourselves that our nation was born because our founding fathers chose to heed the call to greatness.
It is true that our sense of nationhood began in victimhood, as an almost involuntary response to a shared experience of often brutal colonialism. In a famous essay published in 1890, Rizal wrote: "A new factor is present which did not exist before. The soul of the nation has been aroused; a common misfortune and a common abasement have succeeded in uniting the people of the Islands."
But if the experience of injustice was the motive power that drove the country's independence movement, it was the hope of "a noble society" that directed it. After centuries of failed insurrections, both large and small, the founding fathers knew that for the revolution to succeed, it must not only be a blow against oppression but a campaign to build a better life for all.
Several days after declaring independence, and speaking for the new government, Aguinaldo called on his countrymen to join him in the endeavor. "(T)aking reason as its sole norm of action, justice as its sole end and honest labor as its sole means, it now calls upon and invites all Filipinos ... to come together in a perfect union for the purpose of creating a noble society."
That was 103 years ago this month. In the century since, the struggle to create a noble society was often reduced to a more basic contest: keeping the freedom won with so much difficulty in the revolution against Spain. We are all familiar with freedom's story line, and how it has ultimately survived the great upheavals in our short history: the American usurpation, the Japanese occupation, the Marcos dictatorship.
As the example of Edsa shows, the more basic struggle of regaining lost freedom is a simpler one. Like the prospect of a hanging, it concentrates the public mind wonderfully. There is one side, and there is the other.
As our sometimes sorry experience since Edsa, however, the higher struggle to build a society worthy of the nation is a more complicated task.
The political turbulence of the last several months -- of the last year, if we include the previous administration's all-out war in central Mindanao; of the last two years, if we include deposed President Joseph Estrada's rollercoaster ride through the public opinion polls -- can be understood as a test precisely of what free men ought to do with their freedom.
"Many there are who talk of freedom without knowing what it means," Mabini wrote more than 100 years ago. "Many believe that once they have gained freedom they may do what they please, good or bad. This is a great error. One is free only to do good, never to do evil."
Right from the start, with the Marcos burial issue, the Estrada administration signaled that it would exercise this freedom on its own terms; that is, in whichever way it pleased. Perhaps it could not be helped; there are many other Filipinos beside Estrada for whom Philippine history is really nothing more than "weather-weather" politics. His comeuppance at Edsa II, therefore, triggered by the sight of 11 shameless senators subverting both truth and justice, may be best understood as Mabini's sublime revenge. A moral people had had enough.
"Such a people is called to greatness," Aguinaldo declared in 1898, "chosen by Providence to be a sturdy instrument for the advancement of mankind; such a people cannot fail ... to take its own place at last, modest, to be sure, but merited, in the great assembly of free nations."
-- Philippine Daily Inquirer/Asia News Network