New Year, New Hope

Filipinos are always hopeful. Almost all people I talked to these past few days expressed hope that better days will come their way this new year 2012. Even the lowliest of people have told me  they look forward to have more blessings in the coming days or months.

I wonder where this profound hope is coming from. Is it from our Christian orientation? I just assume it is innate in our culture as a people. In fact, there have been surveys indicating we Filipinos are some of the happiest humans on earth. Yes inspite of all the hardship that majority of our people experience everyday, we still put up smiling faces!

Oh, so we choose to be hopeful and happy despite all odds.   While this attitude is admirable, many times we become complacent and sometimes overly dependent.

Take for example those families who have relatives working abroad. I know some neighbors who remain unemployed and yet they have money to spend everyday. It is because they receive monthly income from abroad. Ah if only they knew how to invest part of this money to make money!

We Filipinos are also dependent on our government leaders. We depend on our mayors, governors, congressman for many things. And now more and more of our countrymen are depending on the government cash-out program. And so instead of striving to make an honest living, many Filipinos opt to just wait for dole outs. How pitiful!

But we remain hopeful - hopeful (not daydreaming) that the daang matuwid of the present administration will lead us to a no-corruption society, hopeful that President Aquino will somehow  uplift the lives of the poor, not by statistical magic, but by providing jobs and social services, hopeful that our once notorious political leaders will be transformed or infected by President Aquino's much ballyhooed integrity, hopeful that the mighty Cojuangco-Aquino dynasty and its tentacles will finally realize the need to share their accumulated wealth with the poor and start distributing land to the landless, and finally hopeful that all Filipinos will do their share in bringing peace and prosperity for all.

  image courtesy of http://www.kaushik.net