Independence?
I look at the propaganda machine of The Arroyo Administration as well as other “presidentiables” including Noli De Castro himself, and I just get sick to my stomach. A whole lot of lip service, and yet they keep our nation as a slave to the oligarchs that run our country. We keep paying the crap monthly fees in order to have the electricity that we so desperately need. They give us all the populist tone that the government is all about helping the everyday Filipino, and yet they focus on keeping themselves in power, irregardless of the plight of the ordinary people.
The politicians talk about Tide and the other products they endorse, but have the most loose and seldom talked about platform of agendas I have ever heard out of politicians. They hold on to stereotypical Catholic Church stands, not because they believe in it, but because it will give them more votes come election day. Politicians rarely work, and when they do, they screw things up, like making a haphazard attempt at doing investigations.
They can’t get things right, because to do so, would mean that they would lose their jobs, and we The Filipino People would actually benefit. They stand for everything we hope for, but behind the scenes they only stand for themselves.
This is a wide-ranging generalization of course, but I believe this to be true for many Filipino Politicians. This is why I believe, that when we express our rights of suffrage, we don’t just throw it away for the candidate with the best jingle, but we create our own candidate, from the grassroots on up. We are in a new age, where we have seen that this is possible, to discard the TraPos of today, which will hopefully give way to more substantive, focused, and inspiring leaders.
We don’t need to be slaves of the old politics, we can create our own.
And so this week where we celebrated Independence Day, I call for a creation of a new sense of independence, not the one that was given to us 110 years ago, because our land is already ours, we are a sovereign nation, yes we can celebrate that, but there needs to be more to independence than having a third of our population in poverty, having to send our fellow Filipinos abroad, and still trying to handle a decades long insurgency.
Independence is all about a sovereign, uplifted, and an inspired nation. An independent nation is a nation that has given its inhabitants all the respect with regards to human and civil rights. An independent nation is where its inhabitants can claim a piece of the pie, not just the crumbs that fall from the table.
If indeed, the inhabitants form the nation, then independence must be based on these individuals, on a collective basis, to disregard and marginalize any sector is again giving form to oppression, not independence.
In this regard, we are not free, because the collective does not hold a piece of the pie, they are not even given crumbs.
However, there is a sector of society, the elites, the oligarchs, politicians, and the businessmen, who mingle in one circle, they are free to plunder our rich land, our resources, but we are slaves in our country, poverty stricken,
In the end, for today, we have to ask ourselves this:
If today is Independence day, who then are these individuals who have this independence, it sure isn’t the slaves of poverty
