ANC’s Ricky Carandang featured the other night a new movement whose call is “Ako Mismo Ang Kikilos Para Sa Bayan Ko.” Their spokesman, Antonio Samson, said that their aim is to “make nationalism cool again.” They speak (in their website) about the “power of the individual to effect positive change.” They wage “battle against indifference and the feeling that the individual is helpless [and aim] to encourage belief in … their innate power to make a difference.”
In doing so, they actually upset the reigning orthodoxies in post-EDSA 1 political discourse. They reverse the Pinoy’s overweening dependency on a paternalistic state. They shift the power back to the individual, the “enfranchised citizen [as] a particle of popular sovereignty” (to borrow the words of Jose P. Laurel). And, as their spokesman tells us, the response has been phenomenal.
Should Ako Mismo succeed, they will offer not just a new cool but a new nationalism as well. And in this they are not alone. Other groups have taken the bold step away from those who “see things as they are and say why?”, in Robert Kennedy’s famous quote from George Bernard Shaw, toward those who “dream things as they never were and say why not.”
For instance, there is a youth group named Rock Ed initiated by bright young Filipinos, including CP David, University of the Philippines professor, environmentalist, and Stanford Ph.D. Their rallying cry is “No More Excuses, Philippines.” They provide alternative venues for young Filipinos to volunteer for nation-building, chiefly through education and the arts to focus public attention on the effort to end poverty.
There is another group that aims to revive among the youth Ninoy Aquino’s legacy. For the generation of Filipinos born after EDSA 1, Ninoy has become simply another icon, celebrated from a distance but never truly felt and understood up close. In 2009, Ninoy the Man can transform more lives than Ninoy the Martyr did in 1983.
Yabang Pinoy aims to restore Filipino self-respect through environmental and entrepreneurial projects. If Ako Mismo uses a dog-tag as their symbol and Ninoy is today symbolized by his dark-rimmed glasses, Yabang Pinoy uses a wristband made of braided abaca, the strongest natural fiber indigenous to the islands and crafted by underprivileged communities. “Call it a cool revolution, a cool Pinoy revolution. Wear the band and raise your fists in the air, not to overthrow, but to uplift.”
And there is, of course, Kapatiran, the pioneer among citizen groups determined to overcome passivity, consisting of spirited citizens and led by Nandy Pacheco, retired international civil servant. In contrast to the other groups, they have actually competed in the political mainstream and fielded candidates in the past elections.
Kapatiran, Rock Ed, the Ninoy Aquino movement, Yabang Pinoy, and Ako Mismo—they all aim to shake us out of our tendency to sit back and complain, but when asked for solutions, merely point to others. In a way, being politically lackadaisical is part of the ideological underside of EDSA 1, and, to their eternal credit, these citizens’ groups have zeroed in on the malaise of the spirit that is at the root of the current crisis. We are paralyzed by a loss of confidence in ourselves.
What these groups call for amounts to what Thomas Kuhn, in his classic work “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” called a “paradigm shift.” Paradigms are those self-contained ways of thinking, the hegemonic mind-sets that actually cabin our imagination. A paradigm does not merely limit the solutions we offer to solve problems. It actually limits the questions we ask and tells us what problems are worth solving in the first place. These citizens’ groups have looked beyond government institutions, beyond the formal rules of the game. They do not ask what the Arroyo administration can do and fails to do for us. Rather they ask what we can do for ourselves. They do not compete with President Arroyo in drawing up those fancy schmancy economic projects that can be done only with super-grants from China. Rather they offer specific reforms we can carry out in the here and now.
The tendency to look to government for everything is fundamentally flawed. It was programmed into our post-EDSA democracy by the rhetoric of the anti-Marcos movement, a hodge-podge of platitudes that romanticized a government that was laissez-faire in politics (and deferred to popular majorities) but welfare state in economics (and enthroned the state as officious superintendent over capital). Those two goals, valid or not, are difficult to reconcile. Reconciled, they result in a monster: a government hostage to the marketplace of power brokers, an economy beholden not to the highest bidder (as it should be) but to the bidder with the strongest backer (as it shouldn’t). We end up giving too much power to the state, tried and tested to be the most inept and most corrupt agent for change.
If the goal indeed is to make it hip to be a nationalist, the real challenge is to find ways to connect with the youth, in their language and with their technology. The dominant Left groups have tried merely to replicate the symbols and rituals of the First Quarter Storm—the clenched fists, the massive rallies and banners, and the melancholy poetry and melodies of 1970s. But that was a time when it was okay to be grim and determined. The ethos of the 21st century is vastly different. Today we seek meaning in the self and not the collective, and insist that we can humanize the world only if first we humanize ourselves.
We must credit the founders of Kabataang Makabayan that, in the 1960s, they woke a nation out of its stupor and captured the idiom of its era. The nationalist youth of the 21st century will have to devise their own.
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