Light

No government is perfect, no one race is without fault, and no individual can stand up to humanity and say, I have never failed to do what is righteous and good. But as the great Filipino F. Sionil Jose in the beginning of his novel Ermita had written, “To those who want to lift this nation from the dungheap of history, the past does not matter—only the present, the awareness of the deadening rot which surrounds and suffocates us, and what we must do to vanquish it.” It does not pay to forever be locked on seeing the bad, it doesn’t help any to just keep regretting what has been done, but it is imperative that we be aware that there exists the bad, that some regrettable things have been done, and recognize that we can do something about it.

With a long history of the nation documented in writing, and an even longer one not captured with words, songs or tradition, this republic is a tired one, tired of quick-fix solutions, slogans that zoom in on the particulars but fail to fit in the big picture, and tired, above all, of the scraps of ourselves we use barely big enough to patch up the holes. What is in order now is to start at the very foundation, to lay the cobblestone once more and go from there. No more makeovers, no more whitewash, no more washing linens in public. Just start from where every began, and should always begin.

I mean the youth, and how they can be groomed to be fit redeemers of their unfortunate but rich past and seizers of their shining future. I mean educating them, giving them what they need to be able to recognize their potential, pushing them forward with hope first for themselves and second for the whole of where they belong to. I mean giving those with the clean slate, the high spirits, the noble minds, the torch to carry on, to learn from the mistakes in history, and to learn from the falls they are yet to make.

For what more worthwhile thing is there for a nation to do but to invest on its youth? What better way is there stocking resources for the coming winter than planting new seeds in new minds to harvest when ripe and mature, to benefit from when the time is right? Education, as in the Constitution, is a right, not a privilege, but more than that—it is what the republic owes its children to compensate for the imperfections they inherited right after they were born. Education is not just small-scale, not like the more complicated ideas concocted by those in the position to bleed the common man dry and leave him with less that what he has. Education is large-scale. From education itself to being educated on its importance, it creates ripples in fabric of history, it not only stitches back in place the broken web, to gives it more color, more strength, a greater ability to withstand the next blows. As in the finding of the shepherd in the parable his one missing sheep when he already has ninety-nine, education
of a single child is a big thing.

The beauty about lighting a candle from another is that it doesn’t take away any of the light from the mother candle, it isn’t any less bright just because it ignited the wick of another, but every one candle you light adds to the total of lights in the universe.

And if every child would be lit, what a bright nation this could be.

And seeing with this light is the clearest, most direct path to building the strong republic that we are hoping for.