“Proud akong Pinoy ngunit kinahihiya ko ang gobyerno ko.”
I did not impulsively react when I first heard these lines from the song “Bayang Di Magiliw” by Hari ng Sagpro. In fact, I was amused and I even nodded the blunt message.
Nothing good has diffused from the government ever since I can remember. Belligerent governmental families, deadly public elections, immortal graft and corruption cases; it had always been this way. Yes, there had been a couple of pleasant activities and schemes, but they pale out in comparison to things that had aggravated sick Juan. Unquestionably, the root cause of Filipino suffering is the Filipino government.
It is probably primitive to say that our government is bad, and is not effective as should be, but one can only lament and protest time after time. A stronger people power revolution may have to be scheduled on a day-to-day basis in order to force a full governmental shift. This is close to impossible, thus, a legislative change of heart is close to impossible as well.
The government is not bad per se; politics is intoxicating it. Filipino politics is so despicable, that it had been openly poisoning the society. The word connotes negativism and iniquity and it is our Pandora’s Box.
During our pre-civilization age, the Spaniards reshaped politics by sword. Ever since, it had brought bridges and limited the potential of our race and natural resources. And since it had been carved in history and passed on to generations time and again, it may have luridly become part of the Filipino culture. The clamor for a better political system may never cease because bad politics had already been knotted to our societal DNA. The more demoralizing derivative of this is that the world may slowly be labeling the Filipinos as racially corrupt. In the future, this will become the shameful lessons in textbooks. This will become the foundation and manifestation of our children’s values. This will become the Filipino trademark.
Evidently, we have not failed to stage, in the global arena, the reasons why we can be the most corrupt people. After typhoon Yolanda battered the country, the survivors have proven the aphorism: the end of one agony is the start of a new one. Media men say that billions of pesos had been doled out by the world, yet, being a survivor, I had only personally felt a slight drizzle of the monsoon-like help they had been telling. This primes up the saying that anything delayed is denied. Justice delayed is justice denied. Aide delayed is aide denied. The Marcos-Aquino political battle seemed to have been revived only with a new character played by Mar Roxas. We saw it. We saw how they demonstrated malignant capabilities. We saw how help was corruptly served.
A whole different beast is causing a myriad of ‘whens’ and ‘hows’ and has escalated a lot of blood pressures: The pork barrel scam. Now, the senate is tiptoeing towards the much-needed answers to where our hard-earned taxes had been channeled to. I am on pins and needles on this one and I know that making the purported culprits admit is like extracting blood from turnips, but in the end, after the period of this chapter, the outcome shall always be painful. Black will never take another hue. The corrupt will always be corrupt and will never die away because corruption is hereditary and willed.
I am not ending this article on an affirmative note. It may be a bitter pill to swallow, but we might have extracted the last glimmer to not spell the Filipino trademark as corruption.
‘Hari ng Sagpro’ in the future might decide to flip his lyrics into: “Dahil sa gobyerno ko, ikinahihiya ko ang pagka-Pilipino ko.”
