ROBERTO A SAMSON, a Filipino-Italian living in Ireland, on why Filipinos must begin to hope – and act – to improve lives in their native country
“It’s a hopeless country!” were the last words of my friend when he had just decided to emigrate to New Zealand. He has a good job in Makati, Metro Manila, with a fine salary, and was planning to build a house for his family.
Then, all of a sudden, concerns for the future of his children started to grow. One day he and his wife made a unanimous decision to leave the Philippines. However, unlike many other Filipinos who emigrate mainly in search of economic security, their primary concern was to give their children the chance to live in a society respectful of laws, where people can still pursue just aspirations – and where politics is not only a matter of pork barrels and self-interests.
Why do so many Filipinos have such a desperate feeling about our country? Why has hopelessness become the trademark of millions of Filipinos? Why do we lack not just the guts to compete with other countries, but also the hope for our coming generations?
We could easily point to the years of dictatorship and the subsequent erosion of public and individual values; the Asian economic crisis of 1997; the emergence of China as the world’s producer; the greed of our politicians; and so on. I’m sure there is more to it than that.
This moment we are passing through is similar to what Pope John Paul II once described as “a sort of collective night, which has progressively fallen over humanity”. At that time he was referring mainly to the cultural darkness enveloping the European continent, with the loss of Christian values and the desperate and futile search for contentment in material things.
This may also be true for us, as economic performance seems to be the only indicator of a nation’s progress. In the meantime, millions of families lose fathers or mothers who sacrifice themselves to work far away from home. I can’t believe that this is the country where doctors study to be nurses and where hundreds of thousands of people work all night in call centres.
Yes, we don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel, and our hope – once the sole undying trademark of Filipino spirit – has now become an empty word. And yet, we believe the light is there, that it has always been there. We are mainly Christians, and the main pillar of our faith is to believe in, and to experience in our lives, the risen God, Jesus. He too went through his own “dark night”, crying out loud (as we’d often like to do as a Filipino people) and asking, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”
Some might find it irrelevant to fall back on a religious experience to provide an answer to the concrete problems facing our country. But as a modern mystic recently remarked: “At times there is a tendency to think that the Gospel cannot solve every human problem but that it is intended to bring about the Kingdom of God only in a religious sense. Obviously, this is not true. It is certainly not the historical Jesus or he as the Head of the Mystical Body (the Church and all believers), who resolves all the problems. This is done by Jesus in us, Jesus in me, Jesus in you … It is Jesus in a person, in a given person – when his grace lives in that person – who builds a bridge, who opens a way.” For believers, it is simply God’s presence in every person.
To achieve this, we should not escape from all the problems affecting our individual lives and the country as a whole, but recognise and love God, who is with us, in experiencing this “cultural night” and like Jesus, we can also say: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). This means facing suffering, separation, political and economic problems in a completely new way, without blaming anyone, but taking them squarely on our own shoulders, as Jesus did. After this we can work as individuals, and even more effectively together, to find a solution.
If we love our country and want it to emerge from this moment of trials, we need to have the same measure of love Jesus showed us. Often I feel that we Filipinos very much confess to being nationalistic, but when it comes to contributing something to help the Philippines, it is each one to his own.
To love means to desire and to do and to give to someone only what is good. I just hope and pray that Filipinos would wake up one day with a new heart of loving, with a new mind of thinking, with a new attitude of acting and with new eyes of seeing our country with love.
