true people power

[do read. :) bolds mine --koko]

Having overthrown two presidents in a span of 15 years, we Filipinos take pride in our very strong sense of people power. But although we are far more dissatisfied with the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo administration than that of former president Joseph Estrada, we seem to have lost interest in exercising our right to take to the streets and cause a change in government. The attempted military coup d’états don’t count since they were mounted by only one sector of society and therefore not representative of our nation as a whole.

My professor in Civic Welfare Training Service explained this apathy quite well: “It’s because we Filipinos know that if we were to stage another People Power yet again, then the world would really laugh at us. Because in the end nothing ever happens, save for the fact that we end up worse than before.”

Because I am studying at the University of the Philippines, I’m regularly exposed to protest rallies, student walkouts, and activists disrupting classes to campaign about certain issues. While I respect their integrity and admire their boldness in speaking up, I cannot help but wonder what effect such commotions have, aside from temporarily pacifying the protesters’ passions and causing traffic.

Our problem as Filipinos is that we’re so good at expressing our emotions, sometimes elevating them to a grand scale like we did at the EDSA highway. But when it comes to the everyday nitty-gritty of working to achieve what we originally set out to do, we’re either clueless or lacking in enthusiasm, or both. We’re too lazy to educate ourselves on how the real world works and how to use the system to our advantage. We don’t want to get our hands dirty and learn how to play the game. We cause one big splash and hope it will do the trick. Then we’re back to depending on our leaders to improve the quality of our lives. It seems as if the only thing we can think of doing whenever we want change is to rally.

The romanticized image of a protester, gritting his teeth against the blazing sun with a fist raised in righteous anger used to excite me. I remember wanting badly to take part in EDSA People Power II when I was 12 years old, but my parents would not let me. Years later, I realized that the success of the cause of someone who takes to the streets depends a lot on whether or not the right people choose to listen to him. But let’s face it: You cannot count on the world to be moral or to care about the things worth caring about. Neither can you mount a platform in the middle of a plaza, give an angry speech to denounce injustice, and expect every passerby to stop in his tracks and forget the appointment he is rushing to make.

Progressive countries are made up of people who take charge of their lives; who can make their dreams materialize through hard work, wit and perseverance; people who don’t demand that the world should first be fair before they make things happen. So maybe the government isn’t doing its job, but do you as an individual really need to wait for it to do anything before you act?

Many of us tend to depend on others too much, especially on people in power. We expect them to protect us and to make our survival and the achievement of our goals as convenient as possible. Ideally, that’s the way things should be. Why else would we bother to elect leaders into office every three years? But it is the next question that is more important: What if they don’t deliver? And what if, no matter how often you oust one politician in favor of another who is seemingly more deserving than the last, you still get the same results? Is that a cue to stage another rally?

No matter what other people may say, I don’t believe that we’ve resigned ourselves to being a perpetually poor and abused nation and that we no longer dream of being recognized and respected as intelligent, skillful and talented people both here and abroad. Most of us are forced to forget what we really want because of the need to put food on our table three times a day. Or maybe because we’ve received more than our fair share of blows, we think that all we can do is get used to the way things are and learn what to expect, as opposed to playing the role of a stupid, still optimistic dog in a hellish pound. I know because I’ve been there, but I realized soon enough that if I stopped aspiring for better things and resigned myself to the status quo, the only person who stood to miss out on anything was me.

For me, real people power would come when we Filipinos learn to do more than just protest and complain, be it on a platform or in the comfort of our own homes; when we all act according to our own expertise; when we become smart enough to solve our own problems instead of demanding from those who have wronged us to set things right. When all these pieces come together, we might find a better nation than what we have today. If not, then at least we can look back at the end of our lives and say we weren’t dragged down with everybody else.

Catherine Grace de Leon, 19, is majoring in Music Education at the University of the Philippines College of Music in Diliman, Quezon City.

**********

De Leon, Catherine Grace. "True People Power." Philippine Daily Inquirer 23 Feb. 2008. 24 Feb. 2008 <http://inquirer.net>.