Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Dreams and why we are under a sorry state as a Nation

Dreams and why we are still in our sorry state as a Nation

Do you remember the exhortation Pope Francis I gave when he talked for the very first time at the Family Day at the Mall of Asia Arena? Pope Francis I mentioned something very important for us to consider, and which, I believed, some of us already lost for a very long time.

I am talking about dreams or dreaming or having dreams.

Pope Francis asked us to dream for our families. What he actually wants us to do is for us to for us to create an ideal for our families to follow.

Having dreams is a good thing because it allows us to create an ideal and plan for its accomplishment. When we dream, we always think of the good stuff and we always try to do things that eventually lead to our betterment, as an individual, a family, a community and as a nation.

Dreams fuel the dialectics of change. Without dreams, there be no change at all.

Imagine if the first homo sapien did not dream. He’ll probably be stuck in his solitary corner in Africa. But because he looked at the landscape and probably thought that there are better places and better things in store for him if he climbs those mountains or walk pass thru that horizon or build something that would allow him to go to those islands, man was able to achieve something better for his life.

Man was able to go to the farthest corners of the world just because he dreamt of a better life.

Change happens when we dream.

When we dream of a better life, we become better men. Fact is, man ascends to a much higher stage of humanization when he dreams.

Dreams cause us to act, to change the landscape, and build things that allow us to dominate and conquer our fears.  We fear about nature, disasters. Yet, when we dream of building things that allow us to analyze those disasters, we are able to understand the laws of nature and use these laws to conquer our fears.

Dreams allow us to discover new things. When we dream of making our lives better, we act and we do things to achieve what we want, and that is, make things comfortable for us. New and better things to survive and prolong our lives begin with us, dreaming of these things.

Great men dream. What made them great is that they dream not just for themselves, but for others. When we dream for others, we accomplish the very purpose of our existence, which is to enrich the world which God gave us.

We dream of living in an eternal state. We dream of finally conquering death. This explains why many of us begin exploring nature to try and understand laws that eventually, give us the one final solution to death. And when we finally realize that there is no such solution, that there is some permanence to the very first law of nature and that is living things have a beginning and an end, we finally come to the conclusion that there must be some dimension other than this dimension that allows us to live forever.

Our history is replete of men and women who struggled just because they dream of making their lives better and more comfortable. These very islands were peopled by the same thing that fueled migration, and those are dreams. The very first Filipinos dreamt that there are probably more places here in these archiepelago that provides them with much better living conditions. This explains why these islands were inhabited very fast, even within a century, is because dreamers went thru and walked these very ground which we now consider our home.

The very reason why our heroes became great men were because they were all dreamers. They dreamt of building a society and a government of their own. They decided to fight their colonizers because they dreamt of establishing a government that they expect, will give them a better life.

The Filipino dream is simple—provide a better life for himself, for his family, for his community, for his Nation.

Most of us dreamt of a better life when we go abroad, of exploring the world, yet, we forgot that one thing that would make this dream of a permanence—that is, we forgot that there must be an end to our exploration, and there must be a start towards applying the knowledge we gathered  and make our very nation, a better one.

This explains why we remain in a very pitiful condition now—because most of us already lost that ability to dream. Admit it—we have already convinced ourselves of the futility of making fundamental changes to our society. That the only answer to our sorry state is for us to either copy what other nations already did or abandon our country altogether.

Our leaders seldom dream for the nation. That explains why many of them only dream of enriching themselves. Ask Pnoy what the government plans to do for the next five or ten or even twenty years, and he’ll be lost for words.

Look at our landscape. The very reason why we see even government buildings rotting in their states is because government bureaucrats already lost that ability to dream. Red tape is one such example of how our government already lost the ability to dream. The reason why red tape exists is because we already stopped dreaming of making processes better and faster.

Why many of us lost their lives during Yolanda? Because our government already lost their ability to dream of better things to do during disasters. Look—with the exception of Senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr, no one ever suggested of codifying risk mitigation measures so that everyone has a guide to follow whenever disasters strike.

This explains why every single year, someone loses his life because government has already convinced itself that, for every disaster, there is already someone who will definitely see death when it strikes.

How about traffic? We are already conditioned to think that there is no permanent solution out there. But there is. There are many innovative ways of managing traffic. It is just that, many of us, especially our leaders who are not dreamers at all, are convinced that no solution is in sight, and therefore, why initiate better things?

Graft and corruption—why it is still there inspite of government pronouncing “tuwid na daan”? Because no one, even the very person why proclaimed such policy if you will describe it, dreams of putting together a roadmap for it. Fact is, maybe the very one who coined that term meant no such morality but only meant “tuwid na daan” like how former US president Bush meant it, which is, “toe the line.”

The Bush-it line is “ if you are not in agreement with us, you are not with us.”

Dream. Let us begin to dream. Let us ask and pray that we regain the ability to dream.


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