We Filipinos Can

We are honorable because we are Filipinos! We are products of revolutions that made the world respect our stance, and quest for freedom. The 300 years with the Spaniards never crushed our national identity. The oppression of the Japanese injured our flesh but not our spirits. The shackles of the Americans chained our flesh, but not our souls. We survived the catapults and sepulchers. We are unwavering, and brave.
We, Filipinos, are clothed with rich heritage of language, culture, patriotism, and heroic deeds. The honorable man, Benigno Ninoy Aquino Jr., even declared that we are worth dying for. Hence, many before us chose to die that we might live. We have been ransomed by the lives of our heroes and martyrs. We are special and unique.
Yet where are we now? The gruesome ills of our nation have tarnished the name our heroes had fought to preserve.
We champion corruption. Our country, in 1980, entered the Guinness Book of World Record for allegedly the biggest corruption of all time. The Office of the Ombudsman claimed that we lost P1.4 trillion to corruption and we continue losing P100 million daily.
The Asian Development Bank claimed that our nation has fallen behind its neighbors in economic development. The report said that our country’s fiscal situation remains tight, and the worsening corruption has eroded investor’s confidence.
Statistics also showed that our country is clad with poverty. Four million preschool children and 3 million adolescents in our country are underweight. Five million adults are chronically energy deficient. Experts believed that our situation is unlikely to improve as long as an estimated 28 million Filipinos are unable to buy food to meet basic nutritional requirements.
Our ills are crippling as we are beseeched by greed, economic instability, and hunger. Add to them our poor quality of education, unemployment and underemployment, and wars in Mindanao.
Hence, I echo Rafael Zulueta da Costa’s poetic lines, “Not yet Rizal, not yet. Sleep not in peace: There are a thousand waters to be spanned; there are a thousand mountains to be crossed; there are a thousand crosses to be borne.”
But again I say, we are ransomed by the blood of our heroes and martyrs. We are a sleeping giant who will once again rouse. Hence our destination is not perdition, but glory.
I agree with the late nobleman Carlos P. Romulo when he said that the seed we bear within us is an immortal seed. It is the mark of our manhood, the symbol of dignity as a human being. Like the seeds that were once buried in the tomb of Tutankhamen many thousand years ago, it shall grow and flower and bear fruit again.
That is why we are entering our jubilee. Our season of greatness, strength and prosperity is soon to come. We are like Samson who regained strength and trampled the oppressing Philistines. We are like Odysseus who after years of wandering reclaimed his throne in Ithaca. We are like God’s chosen Jew, entering the Canaan, the Promised Land.
We will never shame LapuLapu, Bonifacio and Rizal. As a nation, we are destined to rise and claim the honor and glory that we once have. We can make change, real and possible.
I cry with the group calling themselves as Bagumbayan. In their manifesto they declared, “We need change on all levels of society—not just of men, but in men…We all need to think, to feel, to act once again as one nation with one destiny, building on both our brightest prospect for the future and on the noblest traditions of our history”.
Yes, we need to reinvigorate our national spirit to rise from the depths and soar to greatness.
Change? We, God-favored Filipinos can!