Wanted: Citizens

In 2016, will it be Mar, or Binay, or Gordon, or Bongbong, or Grace Poe, or Miriam, or Duterte, or Manny Pangilinan? Or, perhaps, Kris?  

 

We have been searching for so long for a perfect President. All our political dreams and aspirations as a people have always been fixated on finding the right leader to bring us forward, a messiah that can save us from the sins of failed leaderships, a better alternative to the present who has failed us even more. 

 

Political science, as a discipline, has a high density of theoretical constructs on the features of a good leader, from the classical philosopher-king of Plato, to the ruthless prince of Machiavelli, to the God-chosen sovereign of the Catholic St. Augustine and the Godly leader of the Protestant Martin Luther and John Calvin. Even the much hated Hitler had his own version of what a “good” leader should be.

 

A Bikolano curse? 

 

Much is now said about the contemporary mantra of good governance, and its features of transparency, accountability and participation. My fellow Bikolano, Jesse Robredo, has been elevated in death to almost becoming a demi-god of good governance for what he has done in life to live a kind of tsinelas leadership that endeared him to his constituents. Another Bikolano, Raul Roco, was also touted by many as someone who could have been good for us, except that he, too, died before we could even give him another chance to serve. This led me to think that the curse on the Bikolanos is that we have plenty to offer in our search for a perfect leader, except that they end up dying before their times come.  

 

There is a tragedy in our search for our leader-messiah. It's when the templates of what constitutes a good leader are usually filled up by people who are no longer available, or are not interested in electoral politics.

 

But there is a more important realization that we need to reflect on. Perhaps, we have been looking for the perfect leaders for so long, but what we in fact need to be searching for are good citizens.

 

This comes to my mind as I recall one incident way back when I had one of my most stressful flight from Manila to Narita, as the first leg in a flight to Honolulu where I was scheduled to have a three-month visiting fellowship at the East-West Center. 

 

The charmless man

 

It was most stressful not because of the turbulence, but because of the company I had. I was seated with a man who, together with his family seated in the opposite row, was going to migrate to the United States.

 

The man was so talkative during the entire four hours of the flight. I was actually stressed not by his being so, since I myself could be just as conversational when I am in the mood, but by what he was saying. I was harassed by his incessant ranting and raving, spilling out his negative commentaries about the Philippines. He did not spare anyone or anything—from our politicians, to our bad roads and infrastructures with the stinking toilets in NAIA Terminal 1 figuring out prominently in his litany of woes, to the dirty streets and dirty children and vagrants roaming them, to our being stupid in electing corrupt politicians, to our cultural quirks, our fatalism and our being “tsismosos” and our habit of pointing our lips instead of our fingers when we give directions. And this is just a sample of his repertoire of complaints about everything that is wrong with our country and our people.

 

Now, let me make this clear. I also have my own litany of complaints about our country and our people. But being confronted by someone who had nothing good to say about the Philippines and the Filipino disturbed me, and in fact, deeply offended me.

 

What actually pushed me to the wall or, to be more accurate, to the edge of jumping out of the cabin, was when the man called me stupid to my face when he learned that I got my PhD abroad, but decided to come back despite job opportunities there. This was my way of serving the country, as a way of giving back to it what it has invested in me, less as part of paying my contractual obligations to my employer at the time, but more to fulfil my civic responsibility to our country’s taxpayers whose hard-earned money was used to subsidize my UP education as an “Iskolar ng Bayan.” 

 

“Isang malaking katangahan” (A big stupidity) is what he said. 

 

Fortunately, this was at the tail-end of our flight, when we were about to land. I could not wait to disassociate myself with him, knowing that, after Narita, we would be taking separate flights to the U.S. But knowing myself, I would not simply have allowed someone to call me stupid; more so malign my country and its people. I plotted my revenge on this poor excuse for a Filipino who, even at that moment, was still haranguing me with his anti-Filipino sentiments, mockingly commenting on how undisciplined Filipino passengers could be, as they would stand up to get their luggage even before the fasten-seat belts signs are switched off. 

 

At the moment that our plane was about to dock in its assigned gate in the terminal, I asked him if he has plans of coming back with his family. It was a rhetorical question since I knew what his answer would be, and I knew it would be nasty. That was part of my plan.

 

As expected, his reply – reeking of disdain to the point that it sounded almost like hatred to a country and its people whom obviously he had no love for – was:  “Of course not. What do you think of me, stupid? I am celebrating today since I am getting out of that God-forsaken land and its stupid people.”

 

The pain in my heart was too much to bear. I wanted to strangle the man to death, but it would have been wasted on someone who obviously is not a big loss to a country that deserved much better. This middle-aged, dark-skinned, flat-nosed, short man had nothing but hatred for a country that I call home, and disdain at its mostly dark-skinned, flat-nosed, and short people whom I will always love as my people, despite their imperfections and flaws.  

 

He wanted to escape to another country where his homeland’s image would remain his burden, as it is clear that in that adoptive country of his destination, no matter what he does, even if he takes his oath of allegiance to the U.S. a million times, and sings the “Star-spangled Banner” until his face turns blue, his ethnicity will always be “Filipino-American.”

 

I gathered my pain and my four hours of angst and used it as reason to fire back. I thought it was the least I could do, and amounted to nothing when weighed against the heroism of Bonifacio and others who'd died for this country. 

 

While many passengers were already standing up to collect their luggage in the overhead stowage compartments, despite the fact that the fasten-seat belts signs were still on, I replied with a smiling impish face: “Good. That is the best thing that you have done to my country [with emphasis on ‘my’]. Now, if you would excuse me, will you please get out of my way as this undisciplined Filipino would like to get his luggage.”

 

We need people who are not silent

 

Our country does not need citizens like this man, who sees nothing but the negative, the flaws, the corruption and the failures. He belongs to a set of people who externalizes the problem without examining their contribution to it: voters who rage against corrupt or inept politicians, but come election time do not even care to inquire into their voting records, or the positions they have taken on issues that matter; people who simply do not even have full knowledge or understanding of such issues.

 

For these people, good governance is simply when government does its job – when airport toilets are spanking clean, when garbage are collected, when crime is down, when people are disciplined. And when it doesn’t, they rant and rave against a government they helped form, a President they helped elect and to which they keep giving high satisfaction ratings in surveys, and the cultural quirks of a people they themselves have.

 

These people deserve to be shipped out of our political communities.

 

What we need are people who are not silent, are vigilant and remain critical of those who are tasked to serve but rule instead, but are also conscious of their own power to make a difference, and have self-reflexivity about their own culpabilities.

 

During the aftermath of Typhoon Yolanda, the internet saw the emergence of a divided citizenry, where on one side you have people who were deeply critical of the Government’s response, and on another you have those who were critical of the first group and admonished them as if they were not nationalistic, and angrily demanded that they first help and do something before they criticize.

 

Indeed, we do not need people who only see the corruption and ineptitude, like that man in my plane, but we also do not need people who would prevent a healthy critical discourse to emerge.  What we need are people whose involvement in civics is deeply rooted on a critical understanding of the problems and issues.  

 

Constructs, theories, myths

 

The academic discipline to which I belong, political science, is equally culpable for a dearth in theories and constructs about citizenship, even as it is a central concept, as one of the four elements of a state in addition to government, sovereignty and territory. In fact, citizens are only painted in two ways—as participants in the democratic political process, and as agents of resistance in social movements and as revolutionaries, and where the latter is even seen by some as dysfunctional moments in politics. This dualistic representation of a citizen leaves a significant gap that needs to be filled, that of citizens who simply do not participate but are critical, and whose resistance to abusive power is mainstreamed in their political participation.

 

We do not need people who are involved without understanding, even as we also do not need citizens who venerate the state without a critical capacity to call it to task for its failures.

 

But beyond the public transcripts of politics, there is also an important space for the critical citizen to thrive. This is the domain of identity politics, where the political identities of individuals are shaped and where the roots of transformative politics lie.

 

This is important because we need citizens who will be bold enough to transcend their own cultural constructs, begin rearing their children to become critical of the oppressive power of the dominant, and be more tolerant of those who are different. We need citizens who live a life that speaks against abusive power and corruption, and attempt to attack it at its roots, for the corrupt state exists only because of a citizenry whose socialization have engendered a kind of power that sees a position as a privilege to rule, and not a duty to serve. We need citizens who will speak truth to power, not blinded by dogma, or by a political color, or by gender or sexual orientation, or by idolizing a particular image or a particular political surname. We need citizens who are not myth-takers, but are instead myth-busters.

 

I believe that the most political moment in our lives is when we, the citizens, discover that our liberation rests not on the permission of others, or on account of the grand stories of refusal, but on the power of our own local, ordinary and everyday small stories of resistance. This makes politics personal, and places our liberation in our own hands. This in turn makes us truly sovereign the way we are supposed to be. — KDM, GMA News