2010 Reflections & More

Creating life's markers at the start of the year is a good ritual. It is also good to review what we believe to be true. So, to continue this ritual, I am sharing the second installment of my life’s lessons :

Justice is an esoteric word for most of us. At the start of my human rights work, since we are into development or alternative law, we said, that oftentimes what is legal is not just. Traditionally, our laws were made by the group in power. Which is the reason, for instance, that the basic sectors through the party list system representation have been made a part of our electoral and political system. That some powerful groups have misused this system is another story. In a nutshell, our justice system has a substantive component which is the content of our written law. The structural component are the organizations which are the purveyors of justice or the pillars of the justice system : the courts, the prosecution, the police, the penal structures, the community, etc. And the cultural component of the justice system are the attitudes and behavior of our community towards the justice system. Good citizenship means making a bit of contribution to work for good social changes in our justice system structures, starting with us. Good policies designed to change behavior and create structures or institutions need to be communicated.

Knowledge management (KM) is a fast developing field because of the current information age. We believe that the one who controls knowledge controls power. And so, crucial to community development is the democratization of knowledge. With popular culture, I guess we should widen our imagination and also think outside the box and not to be drawn into the herd mentality that is anathema to positive change. Many traditional values violate human rights such as a patriarchal system that undermines the rights of women.

Love is universal. There are many kinds and they say that the highest form is agape which is about sacrificing one’s interests. Our educational system is still wanting in teaching and inculcating love of country or even love of humanity.

Money is a means of exchange. It can be a measure of one’s passion or industry. We are custodians of wealth and I believe that those who have more money must take responsibility for making this world a better place. Someone said, that one cannot have so much money without the element of violence. Most of all, we cannot bring money to heaven.

Nothing is constant but change. We have been taught that the change agents are our family, the school, our religion, etc. These change agents themselves need changes, too. The concept of family is more than the traditional nuclear or extended family. The laity is not a force to reckon with in the church as evidenced by our religious hierarchy’s supremacy in being able to determine government policies for the reproductive rights of women.

Opposition to the established order is a healthy exercise in a democracy. They say any structure has a tendency to be corrupt in time. Homeostasis and equilibrium just maintains the status quo. Marxism is a theory about conflict and is still very relevant to this day.

People power is now written in our constitution. The concept of recall, party list system, etc are all about people power. But, we must be wary about mass politics that elects the popular and the entertainer. Governance is a skill and an art. But thanks to people power, as it is a deterrent to the rise of tyrants - even if it takes time.

The Quality of life and its changing standards is an index of development. Our kind of development must be a society that can produce the likes of Rizal or a Mozart or a community that can produce a graduate from a remote village in our countryside and can have the same opportunity as anyone to, for example, be able to enter the United Nations to lobby for world peace and development.

Raison d’etre. Life is probably more inspiring or worth living if we believe that we have a reason for being ( raison d’etre). This is about finding our place or niche under the sun. One of the messages I got from the new year text brigade is about waking up and going back to sleep to dream again or to really wake up and chase those dreams. This ‘reason for being’ is also the equivalent of the mission in organizations and corporations. For the mission to be accomplished, it must be couched in specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time bounded goals, objectives or outcomes.

Supreme Court. Our Supreme Court is on the spotlight now because the term of Chief Justice Reynato Puno will expire upon his retirement when he reaches the age of 70 on May 17, 2010 and the issue is whether President Macapagal-Arroyo has the right to appoint her choice because there is a ban on “midnight appointments” or presidential appointments two months before a presidential election. Right off, presidential aspirant NoyNoy Aquino was heard as saying that he would not recognize Ms. Arroyo’s appointed Chief Justice if he won the May presidential election because NoyNoy says that would be “contrary to the constitutional ban on appointments…contrary to propriety, delicadeza and precedence.” Notice, that NoyNoy’s remarks invoke both legal and moral grounds. I have always believed that indeed morality is learned from parents if not in kindergarten. Anyway, the University of the Philippines College of Law has issued a statement that a vacancy in the Supreme Court will not be a problem as an acting chief justice can be appointed from among the senior members of the Supreme Court.

Texting. The short messaging system and the information technology have certainly made profound changes in our lives. But, have you experienced disengaging from your mobile phone for a short moment and experiencing bliss from the disconnection? I read that You Tube which is just five years old in 2010, now gets 1 billion views a day; China & India have 350 million internet users; in poor countries, half of all households are mobile phone subscribers. In the coming election campaign and elections, mobile videos and cameras can be used to monitor election offenses and crimes.

United Nations. The representatives of women’s movements worldwide will meet in the United Nations New York for two weeks in March 2010 to mark 15 years after writing the women’s Platform for Action in Beijing in 1995. The meeting is not a General Assembly level but a commission level or the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) meeting. The NGOs preparing for this big event are saying that there won’t be any negotiated document for the CSW but there will be a one page declaration that reaffirms governments’ commitments to the platform written for women 15 years ago. Each country will present progress reports on how they have implemented in programs or policies or legislated the 15 year old Platform for Action during the two weeks in March 2010 including responses to the questionnaires sent to governments by UN regional bodies. Of course, many NGOs will make alternative or shadow reports.

The United Nations needs reforms. After the 2009 climate change summit in Copenhagen, we saw that it is now very difficult for 193 countries to agree on something. Governing the world as one is almost impossible now even if the issues are voluminous. Countries are grouping into small clusters according to issues & themes and geography. To the extent that country issues and problems are solved and countries develop to join the rich club of nations, this kind of governance is perfectly all right. Who needs a global world that is divided into very rich and very poor?

I was recently interviewed on DXDC radio and was asked about my principles and values. This is my annotation to my short answer. In academe, we were introduced to the idea that Filipinos have some negative values which have contributed to our underdevelopment : hiya, pakikisama, utang na loob, ningas cogon, bahala na, etc. Later, other Filipino sociologists have debunked the negativity of these values ( as these values can really be seen in positive terms) and other experts even suggested that the respondents interviewed in that study of the so- called negative values were lowland Christians to the exclusion of other highland tribes. Another framework in the study of values is to evaluate our values against universal values such as human rights, democracy, social justice, sustainable development, etc.

Some of the basic tenets in the discussion of values are that cultures and communities believe that their values are best ( ethnocentrism) and that we should not pass judgment on the values other cultures ( relativism ). But, I say, we have to differentiate between understanding cultures and evaluating whether cultural material practices violate universal standards of morality or human rights. This is to say that values really do change. One example is the death penalty. Our ultimate legal penal sanction now is life imprisonment as we have removed the death penalty in our laws. The basis for this change is the premium placed by our legislators on the concept of restitutive justice.

One of the modernity values being promoted now is sustainable development which is associated with the environment. Of course, in ecology ( the study of the environment), the human being is at the center of the environment. Let me focus on the brown ecology or our cities and the rise of informal settlers in our urban areas. The migration of our peoples to the cities is partly due to so much poverty in the countryside. Some economists are now saying that one of the major causes of our poverty is really our neglect of our agriculture industry. The Philippines remains poor because according to Bernardo Villegas, we used a large chunk of our resources in the manufacturing sector and so there were “ no more resources left to build farm-to-market roads, irrigation systems, post-harvest facilities, seaports, and airports that were essential to making our small farmers productive. Agrarian reform failed, not because of the fragmentation of land, but because we did not provide the small farmers with the wherewithal to be both productive and cost-effective.”

This is also to show that there is a rural - urban continuum. Decongestion of our urban cities means that we should develop our countryside. If the rural people are economically productive they will also have the purchasing power to consume industrial products. In this sense, both agricultural and industrial sectors are related, too.

The other reality in our country which is sure to change our values is diaspora or the dispersion of more than six million overseas Filipinos who are working in almost two hundred countries in the world. Although, the downside to overseas migration are many, at least one positive saving grace is that our fellow Filipinos will surely bring positive values when they come home and measure our way of behaving and doing things with the best that they are experiencing in other lands.

Most of all, the one positive value that we should be working on at this juncture of our democracy is to promote the sacredness of the election ballot. When we are able to make our communities vote buying free zones, we will be able to give a chance to deserving candidates and political parties that do not have the largesse and tendencies to corrupt our fellow Filipinos.