‘Eyes wide shut’
When will this country come to its senses? When will we, Filipinos, realize we cannot keep on changing leaders within an essentially non-egalitarian socio-economic system and hope to arrive at an equitably prosperous society? As Albert Einstein would say, it’s insane to do the same thing over again and expect a different result.
Every election, candidates promise the same things their predecessors promised in previous elections: jobs, housing, health care, education, honest governance etc. Yet, where are we today?
The pre-pandemic unemployment rate was very high. Higher yet if you throw underemployment in. Moreover, a big number of the employed are underpaid. Many workers have to work abroad to get a living wage or better.
The agricultural sector remains vastly neglected as shown by its low productivity yet higher cost and, mainly, by the worsening poverty in rural areas.
Not all Filipino children of school age are getting basic education for lack of classrooms. Many children are unable to go to school because their families are mired in poverty, the country’s core problem politicians merely promise yet do next to nothing to sol ve.
Corruption has hardly abated. Elected officials routinely get commissions for projects while many government office workers require grease money to do their job. An insensitive bureaucracy makes small people wait uncomfortably for hours to do a five-ten-minute transaction.
When are we going to open our wide-shut eyes? Candidates do not make good on their promises because they cannot do it unless our intrinsically inequitable system is changed. But they won’t change it because they belong to society’s elite that exclusively benefit from it. Note how they ran Federalism to the ground. Note how the current crop of candidates promise to solve the edges but never the core of the problem of massive poverty.
Every election, we ask voters, and teach them how, to vet candidates for honesty and competence. And many of them do just that. Nevertheless, we continue to languish in a grim socio-economic hell-hole.
And the reason is very simply that the honest and competent officials we elect are readily swallowed by the system and end up applying nothing more than cosmetic dabs on the badly scarred face of Philippine society.
History shows that societies in time find their way towards a system that better serves “the greater good to the bigger number,” that the poor masses eventually come together and liberate themselves from the system that marginalizes them.
That is not likely to happen anytime soon here. On May 9, we will still choose, with “eyes wide-shut,” from candidates who promise to merely smooth the edges but never the core of the problem. Changing leaders will not cut it. The country’s deep-seated problem of mass poverty is not going away until the system, the core, that spawns it is changed.