Hole in the head
Frankly, I don’t know what madness has persuaded the people calling for Charter change to call for Charter change. At the very least it’s irrelevant; at the very most it’s harmful.
The irrelevant comes from the fact that it’s another case of bidding the waves hold still. Or it’s another case of trying to fit reality to law and not law to reality. The callers for Charter change say they will limit Charter change to purely economic changes, with a view to creating the economic environment that will assure economic progress. In fact, it will assure it only as passing a law castrating rapists will stop rape in this country.
The current Constitution does not lack for ways to deal with new economic challenges. What it does lack—which is a completely justifiable lack—is a provision putting the country on hock. Or specifically, a provision that allows foreigners to own Philippine land and public utilities in full. Which seems to be the intent of Charter change—to open them up to majority, if not full, ownership by foreigners on the discretion of Congress.
The question this raises is: What if it ravages this country beyond belief, as it is bound to do? Are we going to have another Charter change to undo it?
That brings us to why this Charter change is bound to be harmful.
At the very least, it’s contretemps. It asks us to open ourselves more to the world at a time when the world is experiencing “the perfect storm,” as “Dr. Doom” puts it.
“Dr. Doom” is Dr. Doom Nouriel Roubini, who accurately predicted the Wall Street crash and the financial tsunami it would spawn. “The 2013 perfect scenario I wrote on months ago is unfolding as we speak,” he said some weeks ago. Mixing metaphors, he warned of a worldwide economic “train wreck” as economic managers in the United States and Europe are “running out of rabbits to pull out of the hat.” The United States, said Roubini, would fall back into recession, stock markets would tumble, Europe would break up, and emerging giants like China would slow down over the next few years.
The signs are already there, less despairing but still alarming, reports show. Retail sales in the United States are at the lowest since 2009, the American consumer having no job, no money and no credit. Confidence in the US dollar is at an all-time low, propped up only by the universal fear that if it falls, everything falls with it. Not quite incidentally, China holds the biggest cache of US dollars outside of the United States, at $1.2 trillion, a fourth of the US external debt. Which makes you wonder how we can possibly imagine that the United States will go to war against China for us over the Spratly islands. China itself is in no position to rescue the world. Who to sell to with the United States and Europe floundering?
Common sense will tell you that when there’s a storm coming you do not rush outside. You make sure your flimsy hut and patch of siling labuyo are fortified and hope to God the storm passes through with minimal damage, most of all to life. The whole concept of changing the Charter to harness what the world has to offer presumes that the world continues to hang a sign that says, “Business as usual.” It does not. To mix metaphors as well, the world currently only offers a bitter harvest.
The point is to make sure we do not reap it.
Far more importantly, this tack merely exacerbates a bane that’s been with us for a long time. What has kept us from bursting out all this time—the opposite of which has allowed our neighbors to do so—is not our lack of appreciation of the world, it is a lack of appreciation of our own country. Hell, it is the lack of knowing we have one.
Long before the Filipino Diaspora took place over the last two decades, Filipinos were queuing before the US Embassy in Woodstock-like numbers. In other countries, living abroad is a last resort; with us, it is the first. We want to live abroad whether we are in dire straits here or not. Proof of that is our alarming brain drain. From 1998 to 2009 alone, the exodus of Filipinos trained in science and technology rose two-and-a-half times. Opportunity, real or not, and not need is what drives us to migrate like flocks of geese for the winter. Creating employment opportunities here alone will not hold us down.
Certainly creating employment opportunities by way of putting the country on hock will create the opposite effect, which is to encourage the Filipino to completely forget he has a home. Its effect on the national psyche will be horrendous. We already have a very loose sense of rootedness, of belonging, of identity, of loyalty, of pride in being a Filipino. You put up a “For sale” sign on our front door, hoping the new owners will spruce up the place—it’s more funny in the Philippines—and wonder if that will make the Filipino love his country more.
We keep looking for what makes our neighbors tick while we keep failing miserably when the answer has always been right there before our eyes. The one thing they all have in common, despite stark differences in cultures and political systems, is a people with a palpable, passionate, ferocious sense of country. That’s what makes for malasakit and heroic effort. That’s what allows a country like Japan to suffer atomic bombs and apocalyptic tsunamis and get back on its feet in record time. That’s what allows a country like Vietnam to have endured mind-boggling losses in a war with the most powerful nation on earth—not a single family was spared the death of a loved one—and roar back like a dragon. That’s what could make even Burma leave us biting the dust in the next few years.
That’s what makes for character. That’s what will allow them to weather the “perfect storm.”
And that’s what we need, like water in a desert. This Charter change?
We need it only like a hole in the head.
