Love of country

Of course it is a fact. If we judge by the current quality of most of our leaders we can conclude: There is no hope for the country. We can even go farther and say: There was never any hope. And we might hark back somewhat nostalgic to the old days when we had people like Ninoy, Salonga, Ambrosio Padilla, Roxas, Diokno, Manglapus, even Marcos, the original one, at the country’s national legislature as a small group of us did last night.

And so we asked: Whom or what do we have now? And then we would be excused to say: If we had little hope then, by now we should have even less. And yet, we have in recent times seen a bit of improvement.

Most of these stem mostly from just dreaming and making the claim we would be a less corrupt country from here on. We should be excused to think there is a ray of hope out there somewhere. But clearly, this ray of hope cannot lean on the overall quality of our leaders. If anything, it is clear this has deteriorated over the years. But all this, even as we grow obviously into a better democracy. And we might as well view this as an obvious contradiction.

The contradiction can be resolved. We need only to come to understand that the institutional leadership of a democracy does not constitute its entirety. Institutional leaders inhabit only a small particular subculture of a bigger democratic culture. They are elected, re-elected and lose within a particular process not entirely inclusive and subject to the overall democratic life. It is possible that in a country like the Philippines, the democratic maturity of people especially the educated middle class may far outstrip the maturity of the traditional political elite.

Traditional political leaders operate as they always have. It is obvious they exist inside an outmoded, corrupted and yet still powerful subculture. But they do not constitute the totality of the Filipino democratic life. The real democratic political life is the bigger universe even if this universe seems marginalized even in the best of times.

But it is a universe which has grown to maturity over the years and will keep growing even as people become more modernized and even as their expectations of their institutional leaders grow and become more critical. Over time, they will grow even more. At a certain historical point their number will reach a level of critical mass. At which point, they might be able to affect the correct changes that would make the country truly better. At which point, we would have less traditional politics. We might come to invent for ourselves a concept of “new politics”.

But it will not be soon. And it will grow in the sense of culture, in the sense of a growing intellectual life, a growing sense of collective self-awareness.

If we doubt this. We should cite historical comparisons. In the beginning of the previous century, our “real” political leaders worked and fought for independence. In time we achieved relative victory in this. Now our problems grow a bit more complex. We deal now with problems of corruption, poverty and the quality of our institutional leadership. Our progress over time may be seen and understood by this evolution of what we perceive to be our country’s chief problems. But this might also be seen and understood by identifying what has not changed over time.

And so we should ask ourselves, what has remained the same over time. What was happening? What did we do in the time of Andres Bonifacio, Jose Rizal and Leon Kilat that we still keep doing even now. One of this is that still as ever before we produce the literature to record change in general. We talk to each other relating orally a memory of our past. We put this down into words and into paper. We recall. We remember. We still write the story of us. And we read these stories giving good example to our children of the value of doing precisely this.

This is the importance of literature and art. This is the real value of story telling. This is the value of “real art”. It is as invaluable as the dream “real politics”.