What it takes to think as a nation

Seeing their lives slowly wasted in a country that offers only limited opportunities to improve their lot, many Filipinos have found hope in a globalized world. Overseas employment has allowed them to hone their skills and test their endurance in a world that is both welcoming and threatening, nurturing and abusive. Their years of struggle abroad, with minimal expectation of government support, have paid off for most of them.

With the money they regularly send out to their families back home, they have been able to rebuild the family home and extend their ageing parents’ lives. They have multiplied the chances of their children finishing high school and college. The downside is that, in the process, they have also reinforced in their children the belief that the only way forward is to get a good education and get out of the country as soon as possible.

Much has been written about the visible social costs of overseas employment—e.g., absentee parenting and its impact on the children, and the breakdown of marital unions over long periods of physical separation, etc. But little is known of what happens to a people’s sense of national belonging when they are compelled to venture into the world on their own, rather than wait forever for the country’s leaders to shape up and focus on building a society in which ordinary people can flourish. What kind of politics grows out of such disillusionment?

I can only suppose that it will be one marked by indifference and dysfunctional citizenship. People will go through the motions of complying with the laws, but with no commitment that they must do so as citizens of a proud nation. They will participate in the rituals of voting and campaigning only because elections are fun-filled diversions, not because they present clear choices of how the nation can be run better. Believing that they should not waste their ballots, they will cast their votes not for worthy candidates who have little chance of winning, but for the sure winners.

When asked by opinion polls where they stand on issues, they will, out of courtesy or conceit, confidently give answers to questions that hold no real meaning to them. Pollsters quantify the weight of their responses to produce approval and satisfaction ratings of public officials—as though people can have true “opinions” on issues about which they are not adequately informed. How many respondents in such surveys can claim enough knowledge of the achievements of the president, the vice president, the senate president, or the chief justice—or what their roles entail—to be able to honestly rate their performance?

Weighed down by cynicism and the attitude that nothing they say or do makes any difference to the way the government is run, they don’t care whether the Constitution should be amended or not, or how basic institutions like education can be reformed to produce a generation that can compete in the world. Lost in social media’s virtual little worlds and fleeting affiliations, the youth have lost their taste for revolution or any form of activist engagement with the real world.

Beyond ties of family, a people needs something to hold them together and keep them engaged in nation-building. What that is has become uncertain for many of us. We are too easily engrossed in the details of police corruption, of political assassinations, of spiraling food and fuel prices, of the lingering scandal of electoral manipulation, of the weaponization of the law against political enemies, of the labeling of people who do not agree with the government—to worry about ensuring the clarity of our national vision amid the threatening fragmentation of the global system as we know it.

In times like these, nations turn to their leaders for a definition of the challenges they collectively face and what they need to do to address those challenges. I have a frightening sense that our national leaders are feeling so secure in their approval and trust ratings that, amid the busy-ness of their overseas travels, they have not been inclined to address themselves to the people and tell them what’s happening beyond the country’s borders.

These thoughts came to me after listening to the recent address of Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to his country’s Parliament. The 50-minute speech, which is available on YouTube, offers a succinct definition of the situation that Singapore presently faces and what needs to be done so that this tiny dot in a vast world does not only survive but will continue to flourish. After briefly thanking the country’s health workers for their sacrifices and the Singaporean people as a whole for their trust and support throughout the pandemic, the prime minister went straight to his core message.

“Singaporeans need to realize the gravity of the external situation. We are facing not just one storm, but several. Let me highlight three big ones: The war in Ukraine … US-China relations … A global multilateral trading system that is under siege.” Like an elder brother, a teacher, and leader, he analyzed the implications of each of these storms for Singapore in plain language. He then asked: What can we do? Three things, he said. Stay united, maintain the spirit of self-reliance and enterprise, and uphold the country’s good reputation.

Singapore has one of the highest per capita incomes in the world, yet its leader tells the people to brace up for hard times ahead. May I respectfully propose that President Marcos take a brief pause from his travels and explain to the Filipino nation how he sees current world developments and what he regards to be the urgent tasks of his presidency.

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