Note: This came into my mind sometime during a biology lecture. Being in front row doesn't help.
Political Nerve
There is a strange parallelism between neuroscience and politics. The Filipino political will is a communal nerve that is constantly under irritation. As of late, it has been slow to function, since the disunity of its synapses leads to confusions that must be sorted out for societal, national, and international stability.
There have been several powerful synapses in our country’s history, and countless smaller ones that are often lost in oblivion, but nonetheless important in our daily function. We can see the more prominent synapses in our textbooks: the 1896 Revolution and the EDSA Revolts, and the lives of statesmen, doctors, educators, scientists, artists, athletes and other luminaries who have achieved immortality in written posterity. In the second category are the thoughts, words, votes, and actions of every citizen, the continuous course of Filipino life in the world today. This writer can only associate herself with the latter.
Our political nerve has been irritated into desensitization and submission. Under the constant strain of scandals, crimes, disasters, and the degradations of the Filipino’s dignity and quality of life, it is no surprise that we have grown to ignore the repeated pricking at our political will. Many former firebrands and leaders have already been cooled and jaded, and our youth are in that same state already even before they have begun to rise. The right to suffrage is grudgingly exercised, our citizens evade paying taxes, and we wonder why officials sit in their offices holding duty only at an arm’s length. We have essentially become numb to our country, tossing around the excuses of failure and a feeling of helplessness against ‘unchangeable realities’.
Why then is this desensitized state so dangerous? The role of the nerve is a relay, a conduit for a message to be translated from a receptor to the brain and spinal cord, and back down to the part that must interact with the environment. The nerve carries a message that must be put into action. In this same light, politics can be considered as the conduit for a people’s actions with regard to the times they live in. In allowing ourselves to be lulled, we have contracted the political equivalent of Hansen’s disease. Despite the downward slope of today’s state of affairs, we hardly move to alleviate suffering, yet we rue over the devastation we see. We allow the various forces of poverty, corruption, globalization, and human and environmental degradation to sicken the rest of our way of life and our wellbeing. In this model, one can only anticipate the eventual collapse of the body, which in this case is the Filipino state and the people.
So what can be done to repair the state of our political nerve? The cure calls for a coordination of the everyday synapses—a leading into the same direction. What is the philosophy of Philippine governance? What is the eventual direction, the ideal of the Filipino? These must be decided immediately. With a goal in mind that shines forth beyond all the turmoil of today, we can begin to revive our numb extremities in hopes of spurring them into action.
The second part would be to reform the will of the people. So many times has this been misconstrued in the various uprisings and upheavals our society has experienced, from every election, to the explosion in media and recently, globalization. The will of the people has been cast as ‘mob rule’, or on the other extreme, the monopoly of just a few in power. Too many of us act out of self-interest, or perhaps with a mere lack of awareness of the consequences of our actions on the wider sphere. In as much as the entire nervous system relies on the precise coordination of synapses and neurotransmitters to elicit a proper response from the entire organism, so we must align ourselves and each and every citizen towards a common goal of national unity. No longer must our individual wills and actions be considered as merely for ourselves, for our families, our local governments, or for the sake of a particular idol or personality. So many have talked of national consciousness, but it up to us to claim our part in it, to redeem and educate the ignorant, to enlighten the multitude that comprises this consciousness. This is so that the will of the Filipino may not be just reactive but proactive and constructive in these tumultuous times.
Though not all things can be changed externally, our integrity in the face of the uncontrollable can be maintained from within. How we change or fall in this new millennium is all a matter of will. Our political nerve needs to be woken up, fast, for the simple fact that our circumstances and our people can no longer afford to wait.
