With the recent brouhaha regarding the open letter of the fine young leader, Harvey Keh, I realized I had seven reasons of my own that should have made me want to leave my country a long time ago.

1. The betrayal of every positive gain we have made to liberate our marginalized and oppressed poor: from Bonifacio’s revolution to the liberation movements of the 70s to the first EDSA to the Local Government Code to new attempts at political and electoral reforms: These were flawed but positive attempts to reform our existing systems so that they are more fair and responsive to the oppressed. However, the elite always seem to manage to subvert these gains and make them work to their political and economic advantage.
2. The widening and shameless gap between the rich and the poor: No matter how much our economy is supposed to have improved, and no matter how much our GNP grows, a vast number of people in peasant villages still have to go hungry 4 out of 12 months of the year while people in walled villages are able to consume 5 times the resources they need to live decent human lives.
3. The fact that even the more enlightened and well meaning of the elite still think that there can be development without social justice: Although it is not bad and even good that much of our development work is focused on the charitable work of helping the poor build houses, acquire health care and good education, it is disturbing that even the well-meaning elite no longer ask why the poor cannot acquire these things for themselves. And none of them even begin to realize that perhaps the liberation of the poor from poverty begins with the brave decision to equitably share profit with the poor from whose productivity these profits are drawn—or that their lack of productivity is caused by the fact that we have alienated the poor from the resources that enable them to be creative and productive.
4. The fact that politics has always been and continues to be the game of the elite: We always blame the poor electorate for the fact that only the corrupt and self-serving are voted into office. Hardly anyone realizes that the poor vote the way they do because the economic, social, political, and governance systems are built on a rationality that alienates them from expressing their own agenda and their own needs. They vote the way they do because the system gives them no real choices and they try to take as much advantage from the exploitative system as they can. To date, there are very few politicians who are real alternatives to traditional politics.
5. The fact that it is the elite who continue to define the development agenda for the poor: The dreams and genuine aspirations for a just society of the marginalized are never considered in the shaping of this country. It is always the elite who define what the people should want and how they should live and what society they should build: whether this elite takes the voice of the government, self-serving politicians, eternally hungry corporations, well-meaning NGOs, or self-proclaimed revolutionary movements. This is the reason we can never rally the disempowered majority behind our programs. The poor are not empowered and the existing systems only use them as the recipients of our good will, as the factors to our production, and the supporters of our aspiration without accounting for their own dreams which are perhaps more legitimate than those imposed by our bourgeois sensibilities.
6. The short-sightedness of the elite in our desire to consume believing that unabated consumption will bring about a good life: With our wasteful consumption, we destroy our world, use up non-renewable resources and take away precious resources from the poor. And no matter how obvious it is that this consumption is the cause of the suffering of the poor and the degradation of the environment, we continue as if we had every right to consume our way out of this world.
7. Many of my students who do know better, who have had some of the best minds show them liberating alternatives, end up becoming the next generation of exploitative elite.

There are so many other reasons to list but these suffice to make anyone with a sense of love and responsibility for the hungry and the disempowered want to give up and pack up. But a person who is held captive to responsibility by their deepest humanity can never give up on the oppressed for the simple reason that no one can have an authentic human life while others are hungry and suffering. While I’m sure Harvey’s letter was mainly rhetorical, similar statements of surrender I have heard from others are mainly hidden declarations of disgust because the precious poor will not fall in with the social reformer’s agenda. For instance, that open letter from a very public, self-proclaimed servant of the poor stating his own good reasons for migrating. Well, there are so many reasons we should want to leave when we focus on our own travails and our own demands. But one has no right to give up when one focuses on the faces of those who demand justice and the simple right to a humane existence. I’m pretty sure Harvey won’t leave but to those others who have taken on this rhetorical call with seriousness, I say perhaps we should have enough of this mock heroic despair and focus on the actual work of liberation the first demand of which is the surrender of our own exploitative lifestyles.

There are so many reasons for leaving this country, but I have never felt that I have a right to dwell on them.

posted at [7:48 PM]