No law granting a title of royalty or nobility shall be enacted.
- THE PHILIPPINE CONSTITUTION
One of the most unsightly words in the English language is entitlement. It suggests baseless superiority of a group of persons because of accident or the work of their forebears. It suggests that genetics and succession absolutely decide one’s rights and options in life.
What I hate even more is that we allow this to be true by our actions and inaction.
The people who run this country and the world mostly consist of these presumptuous heirs of the wealthy and powerful. They are the landowners who resist the changing social needs and choose to keep their huge tracts of unproductive land for their own pleasure. They are the sons and daughters of privilege, luck, and influence who breeze through life with fancy clothes, nightclubs and designer drugs. They carry their names proudly like banners of moral terrorism against all who live quiet normal lives.
We may not have a nominal house of nobles, but our government seems to act like one. During the past weeks, many of these persons who claim to be our representatives have proved to act only for themselves and those they owe allegiance to. They use culture, breeding, and pretty words to justify keeping what they already have, without moving an inch to improve the lives of those who look up to them for succor.
Feudalism in Europe and Japan has ended long, long ago. But the Philippines still carries the system with pride. People still lord over the poor just as they did during the middle ages. Too bad our nobles do not fight it out as the knights of olden times did. Too bad our system of choosing leaders no longer involves strength, intelligence, and compassion, otherwise we would have a President who is a combination of Manny Pacquiao, Epifanio de Los Santos, and Cardinal Sin. A very tall order, but a striking ideal, nonetheless.
We hate being called a nation of servants to our face, only because we cannot and will not face the unsweetened truth. We are servants under very few but very powerful masters. Most of us live under the poverty line, even after a full degree of college. The poor stay landless and dreamless as they eat scraps from the tables of the greediest members of Filipino society.
And here we are, the educated middle class, caught in the center of a raging storm ready to erupt into cleansing bloodshed. We can either choose to imitate those above us and accumulate everything we can for ourselves, or we can look below us and pull up as many people as we can from their hellish lives.
The good news is that we are not a defeated nation. Everywhere you look today you see collective movements and powerful dissent – clusters of resistance that act as breakwaters that stand against the crashing waves of the tainted and the corrupt. People from all walks of life, young and old, wealthy and poor are coming together to defend human solidarity against those who act only for themselves.
Let us bring down our masters by exposing them for what they truly are -- greedy animals, undeserving of the powers and duties entrusted to them. Let us be merciless in our search for truth so that we might all be able to act with our very best judgment.
To save our country and our people, we must be a nation of servants… and be damn proud of it.
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