Pretending
(Herman Tiu Laurel / DieHard III / The Daily Tribune / 07-27-2015 MON)
It's time for another massive dose of deception. It's the Palace Idiot's State of the Nation Address (SoNA) and another day of pretend.
Pretend this country is a democracy. Pretend that the bumbling Idiot is reporting to and not deceiving the nation in another annual SoNA. Pretend that the nation's political leadership cares for anything other than its own perpetuation in undeserved privilege and power. Pretend that this country is a republic, independent and sovereign. Pretend that the economy is growing. Pretend that the nation's poor are getting a better deal now than before. Pretend ad nausea.
Outside of politics: Pretend that this nation is blessed because of religion, and this WE proclaim this to the World. Pretend that religions, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, Evangelical, Iglesia ni Cristo, Dating Daan, Tamang Daan, Jehovah's Witness, Mormon, Islam, and what have you are savings souls. Pretend they don't instead enrich their own clergy and the economic oligarchies--the real masters who share billions of the loot. Pretend to keep the masses from realizing that they have a right to this world and not just the next.
In foreign relations: Pretend that this country has a right to more territories when it does not and cannot defend and develop territories it is already entrusted with by history. Pretend that this country must fight for its international rights when it cannot even preserve and protect its own people's rights to basic food, health care, education, housing, creativity, productivity, and family life.
Pretend that the most fundamental guarantees of its Constitution--written, too, by the most pretentious people--entitle Filipinos to "a just and humane society, and… a Government that shall embody our ideals and aspirations, promote the common good, conserve and develop our patrimony, and secure to ourselves and our posterity, the blessings of independence and democracy under the rule of law and a regime of truth, justice, freedom, love, equality, and peace…"
Pretend that all this is true even when 50 percent of the nation is assured of permanent unemployment or underemployment due to the oligarchic structure of this society's finance, credit, property rights, and economy.
Pretend as well that this country can and should aggressively prepare for "credible defense" when all of the nation's economic surplus, amounting to a trillion pesos or over $20 billion a year, is appropriated as profits by 40 oligarchic families or corporations in cahoots with transnationals while the national budget is left with a pittance to partition among 100 million hapless Filipinos.
Pretend still that the Philippines' defense budget of $500 million isn't paltry compared to Vietnam's $4 billion or China's $150 billion. Pretend, as some self-proclaimed US-succoring Filipino patriots do, that a $15-million Israeli missile system is "credible defense."
Can we stop pretending and, as a nation, start reclaiming even only half of the P1 trillion in annual profits the 40 or so oligarchic families and corporations siphon off into their bank accounts? Can we finally devote such resources to this nation's social welfare, economic and defense development, for a stronger population with a stronger will, and a stronger defense force? Can we seriously build a self-reliant economy by way of self-sufficient agriculture and industry so as to break free of the perpetual cycle of mendicancy?
Can we stop our religious pretense and return to secularism, science, and technology as the liberators of our people, and end the nurturing of the myth of religion as the savior of this nation? Can we wake up to the fact that religious groups are granted tax free status on billions of their annual revenues from collections and behest businesses with government, even when they do not produce real goods and render only service to the oligarchy to keep the masses and the nation docile, uninformed, and prostrate? Let's stop pretending that religiosity is spirituality--one is slavery and only the latter is authentic.
Some of the young leaders I am investing hope in have seemingly lost faith in the essential goodness of man. They have begun to believe in the articles of faith of the capitalist and oligarchic system, that "Greed is good" and there can be no genuine altruism, no natural instinct, among human beings for the collective good. They have been indoctrinated with the pretense that capitalism promotes, that all men are greedy at the core. That is the greatest sham one can delude himself into accepting even if, deep down, we must love all of creation since we are part of it.
We pretend today that there is no more "ism" to debate about; but as we can see in the stark and desperate realities our suffering society and people now face, the "ism" debate is still vital to our nation and our family's and our individual survival as human beings with human values.
Capitalism--along with its most grotesque embodiment, imperialism--is a failed god while the old "mixed economy," with new names of "social-market" or "market-socialism," is proving to serve nations and the peoples of the World better. Of course, there's the shift from unipolarism to multipolarism that this nation is still oblivious to.
So let's stop pretending!
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