Democracy and ZTE by Ryan Maboloc
February 27th, 2008 at 6:30 am (General, National Politics, Writable Writes)
I received this forwarded email by Ryan Maboloc, a 32-year old Filipino currently taking up Masters in Applied Socio-Political Ethics in Sweden:
From a descriptive point of view, Mr. Hadji Balahadja’s analysis of Philippine politics (The Call for Social Democracy) is right. There is corruption in government, bad leadership, the same genes are in power, etc. From a prescriptive point of view, I think the solution lies somewhere else. Not in politics. Not even in changing the system of government. Democracy is only instrumental to people’s freedom; it is not freedom in itself. Democracy, at best, in the way it is practiced in the Philippines, in our dear country, secures only, through mass protests, the negative rights of people, i.e. freedom from an oppressive government, freedom from corruption, freedom from violence, etc. But, at the end of the day, when JDV wakes up in the morning, when GMA reads “There’s the Rub” in the Inquirer, still, they’ll be sitting in their verandas, their coffees served in imported porcelain, and mind you, they won’t even touch their salamis. Now, the same is true to some wanna-be-heroes, i.e., businessmen, priests, professionals, the so-called civil society. But the real issue is, if you know where and what, is the fact that the common tao will wake up thinkin’ “unsa ug asa ko mangita ug pamahaw para sa akong lima ka anak?”.
