BY ROMMEL YNION
I’m starting with the man in the mirror. I’m asking him to change his ways. And no message could have been any clearer. If you wanna make the world a better place, take a look at yourself, and then make a change.
– Michael Jackson, Man In The Mirror
HACKNEYED as it admittedly is, this still rings true today: If a man is right, his world will be right.
Written ad absurdum by self-help gurus like Og Mandino, Napoleon Hill and William Clement Stone, this bromide has obviously has not sunk into our minds yet as we witness for eons past the evolution of a national pastime that has preoccupied many of us, especially in media: The Art of The Blame Game.
From sunup to sundown, we, especially in media, blame nothing but the world for our misery, with our vituperative pens – or, to be more precise, our laptops – overheating with venom, our mouths frothing with rabies just to accentuate the fact that life seems to have given us the raw deal.
But is it really life or the world that is the problem? Or simply, us?
Oh well, we all have heard it: Every time we point an accusing finger at the world, three of our fingers are pointing at us. Is it nature’s way of reminding us that we first have to look into ourselves before we blame the world for our misery?
We really have nobody but ourselves to blame for the mess we all have sunk in. All around us, we see nothing but the monstrosity of it all: unending disillusionment, deep-seated misery, and deeply-ingrained hopelessness.
Has life given us the raw deal? Frankly, I don’t think so.
Take, for instance, Africa. We all have seen images of this continent in books, magazines and even the Internet: malnourished children in hospitals, human skeletons virtually walking around the desserts (which reminds us of Michael Jackson’s music video Thriller), sacks of food thrown onto the starving masses from USAID 10-wheeler trucks.
Africa blames its poverty on the aridity of their land and the internecine strife among its tribal communities. But actually, the major causes of African poverty are lack of education and its culture of corruption. They lack the necessary education to make their land productive enough for their populace.
They also perpetuate a culture of corruption which paralyzes any upward movement into the future.
All Africa needs to sustain itself is to take a closer look at Israel. For in stark and bitter contrast, the Israelis live and even prosper in a land that is as parched as that of Africa. But why do they not experience shortage of food for their citizens? Because Israelis looked deep into themselves and dredged up ways from within their souls to help them help themselves.
Israelis have developed ways that enabled them to grow food even in the air – yes, they don’t need soil to grow all kinds of crops. Today, state-of-the-art greenhouses dot the Israeli desserts from where they harvest daily their tomatoes, bell peppers, lettuces, arrugulas, etcetera. In short, to them aridity of desserts can even be helpful in food production, with weather rendered irrelevant by green houses, and with scarcity obliterated by their sheer will to survive on their own.
As they say: If there is a will, there is a way. We can write non-stop about this in this space, underscoring many other cases of man’s triumph over his finite environment. But due to lack of space for such a multi-faceted topic, we can only breeze through other examples.
Let’s take a brief look at Japan which sits on a rock, unable to produce its own food but resorted to the mass production of vehicles to export the world over so its economy could be rich enough to leverage its wealth against the rest of the world that can help it fill its needs.
Singapore is another country worthy of emulation. Sitting on top of an island as big as Guimaras Island (or, maybe, just a tad bigger than it), the former British colony epitomizes excellence at its core, now bustling with economic activities never-before dreamed of just a generation or two ago.
A backward country especially after the last war, Singapore had to survive the dismantlement of colonial rule due to disillusionment with Britain’s failure to protect it during World War II, the birth pangs of Merdeka, and self-determination, and economic struggles until Lee Kuan Yew transformed it into a modern industrial state – but, that’s another story that requires reams of paper to elucidate.
But yes, Singapore was so poor that at one point in its past, it had to import water (yes, repeat – water) from Malaysia because it had to contend with scarcity from its own land bereft of any significant natural resource to feed its citizens and quench their thirst, let alone put its economy on the path to even just a modicum of economic growth.
How then did Singapore do it?
Answer: Just like Israel and Japan, Singapore looked into those men in the mirror and thought of ways to build their character first before attempting to build their country from the ground up. They never wasted any time whining about the problems besetting them or blaming the world inundating them with what others label as raw deals life had given them.
Nope, they didn’t do any of that nonsense. They dug deep into themselves for the long haul, ferreting out solutions to their problems, keeping the faith even when nothing but darkness greeted them every step of the way, and ultimately discovering the God within them that led them out of their misery, onto the path of growth, and into the sunrise of progress, prosperity and peace.
No doubt, we, unfortunate Filipinos, can derive hope and inspiration from the stories of these other nations. For Chrissake, let us not allow ourselves to be like the Africans who blame everything but themselves for all the tragedies that have befallen them, impoverishing them, dashing their hopes for any form of salvation from their unending misery.
Let us be different from them.
First, we must recognize that our government is just a reflection of our way of thinking. Blaming our government will not do us any good. Why don’t we just focus instead on the fact that we are still politically immature in choosing the right leaders for this country because since time unremembered, we have been choosing the wrong ones to sit at the helm of our ship of state.
Second, we must accept that we are a nation of Juan Tamads, waiting for fruits to fall on our foreheads as we sit nonchalantly under the canopy of trees, salivating over the mere sight of them.
Blaming our economy will not also get us anywhere. We must instead set goals and work hard to achieve them, collectively building this country from the ground up with our own blood, sweat and tears.
Lastly, we must keep our faith in God who can give us the right ideas to help us chart a new course for this country, who can strengthen us when all else seem to be lost, who can remind us that only those who continue keeping on will see the day break amidst the shadows flying away from our doubts forever./PN
