Our collective inheritance

Bad iyon” is what we often hear elders tell children to reprimand the latter for doing something wrong. Back in the day, it was normal to take a beating with the ephemeral flying slippers, the snapping leather belt, or the rigid clothes hanger. Mischievous toddlers caught stealing from the mother’s coffers to buy merienda or when caught mimicking adults bickering with expletives get a dressing down—a sure way to learn the lesson not to steal, no matter who you’re stealing from and no matter the amount, and not to say bad words. But as we grow up, we learn to make flimsy excuses. “Ibabalik ko rin naman” when we take what is not ours or a derivative of an expletive that sounds quite like the original. All these are not to get away but to get around and rationalize our petty acts.

Alas, in a society where we shame the trivial and brush away the extravagant, we need to do a lot of undoing. When the powerful get away with almost anything and we accept it as it is, that the status quo is eternal, it disempowers us from seeking accountability from the highest echelons of power. Instead, we become content with jailing the defenseless who stole canned meat to feed the family. By all means, this is not a justification for crime.

From the secular to the societal, stealing is forbidden. But when we lose faith in our system for how it is perceived to be failing the poor and marginalized while the rich get away scot-free, grand schemes like graft and corruption become institutionalized. The public is stupefied at how it can know so much but do so little in the face of people who make themselves larger than life to cling to the corridors of power—in politics and elsewhere.

Just recently, I heard from a pollster that the last mass movement we had to express defiance of something larger than our conscious collective was during the pork barrel scandal. The pork, a euphemism for government spending for pet projects of politicians, epitomized the greed that most in power aspired for. The pun is ripe. It’s pork that fattens the pockets. It’s pork that’s roasted in charcoal, so tender and crispy on the outside but soft on the inside. It’s pork that everyone—from the politician who sponsors and gives it away as if it’s not from the public coffers getting the larger share, to the general public supposedly benefiting, albeit at a disadvantage. However, remember, too, that it’s the excesses of pork consumption that lead to noncommunicable diseases, as doctors say. So no matter how it was cooked, as in the long roast of lechon, the flavorful adobo, menudo, or afritada, or fried in its own oil, anything too much is not good.

The Corruption Perceptions Index ranks the Philippines at 115 out of 180 countries with a score of 34 out of 100 in 2023. Down to the man on the street, the common rhetoric in months leading to the elections is the talk of corruption—how it ails and drags us down, how it plagues like a non-curable illness. It’s our common go-to word often associated with government, the entire bureaucracy, regardless of whether we speak of elected or career officials. That’s why we reward the exemplary and let the rotten ones get out free.

But it’s not just corruption. A whole gamut of social ills we can trace to the centuries we were colonized, to the time when Jose Rizal wrote his two novels, to the time the dictator declared crackdowns, to the time Lino Brocka directed films, to the time we twice went to the corner of Edsa and Ortigas to oust leaders, to the time when the speeches from the halls of power spoke of killings.

All this talk is too cynical, helpless, and hopeless for a nation so jaded yet prides itself on resilience. That’s the ultimate irony. University of the Philippines economics professor Cielo Magno says that we do things for our kids. (But that may not necessarily be true for some.) Many of those who were once tagged as the hope of the motherland have either been arrested, killed if they were on the margins, or abroad enjoying a quiet life far from the vagaries of leaders here if they’re privileged enough. Their fates are sealed.

But, for the generations to come, those who’d look up or down on our generation, what do we give them as our collective inheritance once they know how to put their palms on their chest as the flag is hoisted on a busy Monday morning?

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Edward Joseph H. Maguindayao is a college instructor in Laguna.