Where Am I?

These are the times when I feel like I am living in another planet. With oil climbing over $90 a barrel and the peso breaching the PhP 43 to a dollar level, and 200 teachers leaving for Maryland and Philhealth approaching insolvency with innumerable accounts of abuse, our leaders are in overdrive forming alliances of convenience that will ensure the protection of their interests.

GMA is on friendly terms with the Speaker whose son publicly accused her husband of standing to make $70 million on a single deal because they both understand the 1950’s concept of mutually assured destruction. Erap Estrada has begun enumerating likely presidential candidates for 2010 without taking himself or his son out of the equation.

I am incredulous because our politicians scheme non-stop to perpetuate themselves in positions of power where they have been unable to advance the country’s best interests after all these years. Like will someone please enlighten me as to what Erap is planning to do when he makes his inevitable comeback? Or what our brilliant economist GMA has in store for our country when she continues to lead as Prime Minister?

The burgeoning price of oil will wipe out all those years of hard work and sacrifices made by the millions of overseas Filipinos. The strengthening of the peso due to the weakening of the dollar will mean that the remittances sent home will have significantly less value and will cripple our already weak exporting industry. The good times will come crashing to an end very soon and we will find ourselves having completely failed in investing in health and education; instead our leaders squandered the money on election automation, fertilizer purchases, infrastructure projects that were primarily planned to enrich, to corrupt, to perpetuate and not to ultimately benefit the incredible number of destitute and uneducated and sick people in our country.

We need to take a different course. And we need to start sacrificing here in our country today. The dollar is weakening because China and other Asian countries are sacrificing and working double hard to satisfy the spoiled American consumers who are bent on passing a terrible loan burden to their succeeding generations. The price of oil will only continue to rise because India and China and all these other industrious nations are willing to pay whatever price to assure a better standard of living for their citizens.

We have remained unwilling because those who could demand sacrifice from us have themselves been unwilling to confront our common fate, our brief lives made irrelevant by our petty material concerns. We need to consume less electricity, we need to take less trips, we need smaller vehicles, we need to save more money, we need to plant more trees and vegetables, we need to clean our surroundings, we need to stop bribing our public servants, we need to pay our rightful share in taxes, we need to stop using the discount made available to seniors if we know there are others who are much more deserving of this break, we need to pay our servants more, we should stop smoking and drinking excessively.

These are what Erap and his progeny as well as GMA and her various allies of convenience should have asked of us a long time ago. And we would have followed if they had only shown us the way.