What’s happening to the country?

Thankfully, the business community and the Aquino Administration are showing us how to focus – pursuing investments to drive identified strategic industries and lift our economy? The challenges are daunting – because practically every sector of society is suspect? For example, can we deal with a government or police or military branch that is not corrupt? Can we use the scanty national budget (or even the local) judiciously or will big chunks leak out because of corruption and inefficiency? Can the lack if not absence of alignment between national and local agendas undercut efforts to aggressively raise revenues (or GDP) and our standard of living?

And are we unwittingly engendering a perfect storm – because our soft, forgiving culture (or brand of patriotism?) wants to protect uncompetitive industries, undermine our competitive sense and spirit, and discourage foreign investments? “Our inward-looking bias has put us out of the game”, laments one. It seems that conversations with friends (over sumptuous meals in trademark Filipino hospitality) veer to the negative whenever the writer and the wife are in Manila. They probably represent many Filipino households: well-traveled, with kids in or who attended schools overseas; and given our affable nature, find the quality of life at home better than living abroad (especially with the coterie of domestic help to boot and the chauffeurs who can teach patience while in traffic); and they have their advocacies, including ‘adopting poor families’ in a manner both material and spiritual.

Yet, they have endless stories to share about how much the country is in decline. They rattle off hard news and ‘real news’ – and punctuating them with boisterous Filipino laughter makes the horrific stories palatable? What is sad is the sense that every sector if not fiber of society has become suspect? How did we get to this? Did Marcos teach us that crime does pay? Is the Filipino culture too soft and forgiving that we simply abdicate if not add fuel to the fire?

We set our expectations rather low and collectively as a people we’ve established a pretty low bar? It could be as simple as accepting stale products from our favorite supermarkets. Regretfully, global competition demands global standards – and we’re competing against Asian tigers, and emerging global players? For example, can our major industries compete head-to-head against their counterparts in the region – like Siemens (European) benchmarking against GE (US)? And why the writer talks about his Eastern European friends – they’ve gone beyond their regional peers to compete against Western global behemoths. Well aware that they’re still learning the ropes re free enterprise, they are pushing themselves to the hilt, to override the learning curve.

What’s happening to the country: is our establishment a representation of irrelevance, wedded to a marginalized economy that is decades old? “As the Dominican theologian Francisco de Vitoria taught, we all have needs and desires and the talent to satisfy them. In the process, we plan the way to live, and develop human society”, says José S. Arcilla S.J. in his Jan 23^rd column in Business World. “The Greeks, who laid the foundation of much of our culture, did not teach "history," as we understand the term today. But they always looked back to the past, to the great exploits of their predecessors.” [ibid]

Is our national pride misplaced or is it the mindset of our establishment that is misplaced? Consider the following: “Currently, the United States ranks lowest among the world's largest manufacturing nations in the ratio of domestically produced goods sold overseas, or export intensity. We must set as our highest economic priority not just increasing our exports, as the president has pledged, but also making the United States the world's leading exporter in the 21st century.” That’s the CEO of GE – confronting the failings in export-manufacturing of the world’s largest economy! Translation: we’ve become the least not the greatest, but we must strive to be the best.

We need to squarely face our own missteps? We can’t put up another façade: our corruption index is pitiful but we care for the poor even if they’re growing in number, and we’re ‘holier than thou’? The writer remembers growing up when the contemporary joke was that we, Filipinos, were ‘OA’ – are we still overacting?