The Future of Our Nation
52Our national hero Dr. Jose Rizal believed that the future of our nation lies with our youth. How very true. It is the young people of today that will determine what kind of a country we will have tomorrow; the youth that could dream and do the impossible for this country we all claim to love.
What happened to the youth of the generation before us; the leaders, the movers, the men and women of power, the very people who have led our nation this past fifty years? Have they given our Philippines a future worthy of her people? We see the answer by the kind of life the common Filipino has lived in the past and the kind of life he continues to live today. We have to look at our nation’s past to see what kind of a future we are headed to. We cannot confront the future without a careful examination of our past.
From the generation of our fathers, many have already passed away leaving uncertain, even dark legacies to our nation. Some will be remembered with curses on our lips and bitterness in our hearts. There are a few who still hold on to power and position, playing the role of elder statesmen with the air of (doubtful) wisdom which they have deliberately cultivated and by which the public may have failed to discern the deception. But we know their sins. We know what kind of record they hold in serving the public. But then again, evil deeds are dimly remembered (or forgotten) with the passing of time especially when there are other, more pressing concerns.
The generation of our fathers, those who were then young men and women; in the aftermath of a terrible war, was supposedly the future of our country. Though seeing the devastation that was Manila, and our ravaged countryside, still there was an air of optimism, a certainty of resolve among these young men and women, when the Philippines was granted independence by the United States, some months after World War II ended.
There was a sense of urgency, clarity of mission for our youth then; seeing our nation in desperate straits from the destruction and displacement of war, yet there was hope. There was no thought of abandoning our country in favor of greener pastures for our young people. The attraction of America or other more prosperous nations of the world simply did not equate with our young men and women filled with a vision for a promising nation. Nationalism and patriotic fervor were the ideals that moved (at the beginning?) our youth then.
The leaders that emerged from that war were our best and brightest. And none fired the imagination, nor fed the dreams for many of our young men than to join the military through a scholarship to the prestigious Philippine Military Academy. The military uniform reflected the highest ideals of service and loyalty to our nation, and none was held in higher esteem than a PMA graduate.
The fifties saw many of these young men being sent abroad after graduating from PMA, on government scholarships to gain knowledge and expertise that could be used for the rebuilding of the Philippines. They knew and accepted their responsibilities and welcomed the task of nation building. After their studies, they came back here determined to do their part. Maybe there were some who were enticed to work and live abroad but they could have only been a few.
My father was part of our government’s efforts to educate our potential leaders then. A few years after he graduated from the Philippine Military Academy in 1953, as a young first lieutenant, he was sent to study in the United States at the Northwestern University in Illinois to pursue a master’s degree in the university’s pioneering Traffic Management Master’s Degree Program. This is expertise that the growing Manila Metropolis would need.
After completing the program, my father went on to tour the major cities of the United States and Europe to observe the latest traffic management practices: New York, Washington D.C., Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and San Francisco; and the European cities of London, Madrid, Paris, Rome, Frankfurt even Amsterdam and Copenhagen. He spent a year and a half away from a growing family to be ready to serve the needs of our nation with the expertise he gained but so did many other young men and women who shared the same desire to serve.
He returned to the Philippines to join the TRAFCON, the predecessor of the Highway Patrol Group where his expertise was needed. He went on to serve with TRAFCON for ten years, his longest continuous assignment in the military. He was offered jobs in the United States and given the opportunity to live there and bring his family, but my father, like most of his generation felt compelled to help rebuild our nation. Regrettably, his service to our country was cut short when he died in 1976 at forty-nine years old, a senior Philippine Constabulary officer assigned to Mindanao at the height of the Muslim rebellion.
Most of my father’s classmates and many other PMA graduates (and other graduates from different universities both public and private) were given this opportunity for further education abroad and many ended up in high military and government positions later. Hundreds if not thousands of scholars both men and women were eventually sent abroad during this period to acquire the many needed expertise for nation building. They were the cream of the crop; our country’s educated elite from where leaders were chosen to answer the call of public service. Public service then was considered an honorable and respectable career.
That was then: an age in our past untainted by greed and plunder; by the opulent and extravagant lifestyles of public servants; by the impunity of the powerful and by the abuse of the supposed guardians of the law.
Today, as in the past, graduates from the Philippine Military Academy have attained high government positions and elected office. We have former military and police officers serving as cabinet secretaries, or some other high ranking government posts. They have become diplomats and ambassadors, representing our nation’s interests with the international community. PMA alumni have been elected congressmen and senators. In fact, we presently have three PMA alumni who are sitting senators (Ping Lacson, Gregorio Honasan and Antonio Trillanes IV) and also several congressmen. Another former Philippine Marine general, Rodolfo Biazon also a PMA alumnus who rose to become AFP chief of Staff now sits as congressman after having served the two term limit for senator.
It seems government has been militarized as former military and police officials dominate top government posts, a practice so glaringly abused during Marcos era and more recently during GMA’s almost decade long tenure. One former government official during GMA’s administration who headed at one time the Departments of Defense, Interior and Local Government, Environment and Natural Resources and finally the Energy Department, committed suicide during an ongoing AFP corruption investigation in the senate earlier this year.
He was the late General Angelo Reyes, former Armed Forces Chief of Staff under the Estrada presidency who withdrew support (at a critical moment) from Estrada who was eventually ousted by people power and replaced by Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Three days after she was installed as president, a grateful GMA made one of her first appointments to her cabinet. She appointed Angelo Reyes as secretary of National Defense, the first of many powerful positions he was to occupy until the waning days of the Arroyo administration.
Ambassadorial posts have been freely dispensed to many retired top ranking military and police officials as reward for loyal service to the powers that be. These appointments in the foreign affairs department have been the cause of continuing friction and dissatisfaction among the professional, career diplomats. GMA was notorious for these kinds of appointments, clearly an abuse of discretion and of glaring patronage politics.
Our former president Fidel Ramos, began his military career as a plebe at the Philippine Military Academy with the class of 1952, before being accepted to the US Military Academy at West Point. General Ramos was to see during his long military career the erosion of trust and confidence in the military and police forces by a public victimized by its abuse and terror during the long reign of martial law and the subsequent leaderships that failed our nation including his own six year presidential tenure tainted too by scandals of corruption.
But in the decades of the fifties and sixties, the military and police then did not suffer from a serious credibility problem. Corruption was relatively unknown in the AFP and the police; not the acceptable practice that it has become now. By and large, the policeman was a symbol of law and order and the military, the defender of our people.
But through fifty years of failed leadership these institutions have devolved into opportunists out to profit from careers that were dependent on political patrons especially during the long reign of Marcos. The military and the police became the tools of powerful politicos who sought nothing but to perpetuate themselves in power and to grab the biggest share of our nation’s resources.
It was only during Marcos’ time, when martial law was declared, that the military and police began to become the private and personal armed forces of Marcos and his designated surrogates. High and lucrative positions in the AFP and Philippine Constabulary (predecessor of the Philippine National Police) were dispensed to those considered loyal to Marcos and in turn a systematized tribute system was quietly put in place.
Marcos himself built his legend (for voters appeal) on his supposed courageous military service during the war and the photograph of a young, smiling Major Ferdinand E. Marcos, dashing in his bemedalled uniform is forever etched in my mind. In fact, for a then nine year old boy like me, during the presidential campaign of 1964, I saw Marcos as the most charismatic and visionary leader the Philippines ever had up to that time. He captivated the crowds as he tirelessly campaigned all over the Philippines, hugging old ladies, kissing babies and even planting rice with farmers under the heat of a midday sun. His smile was infectious. Compared to the dull Diosdado Macapagal, Marcos was a rock star.
His eloquence, his youthful exuberance, the lovely wife and his solemn promise of making our nation great again were enough to make many Filipinos believe as I did then, that with Marcos the Philippines future was assured. How wrong we were and later events would unravel the evil disservice Marcos plagued our nation with.
TO BE CONTINUED
