Philippine Daily Inquirer
My favorite cardinal, Chito Tagle, has an interesting observation about corruption. It begins at home, he says. Much of it owes to cultural factors and therefore its solution must also be cultural and not just political.
“If corruption exists in homes up to the higher level of government, it must be cultural. So how can we provide a cultural response? Parents should be good models to their children at home. But for instance, if you see your parents owning three cell phones, maybe you can ask them why they have three when one is enough. And where did they get the money to buy and maintain them? That is a question that will change culture and will make parents alert. It’s not only the parents who should look after the children but [also] the children after their parents.”
This may sound a little naive or innocent, but it is not totally out of this world. I myself believe that the home has a great deal to do with corruption, that the culture has a great deal to do with corruption. It plants the seed, cultivates it, nurtures it.
I don’t know though how far kids will readily be able to rein in their parents from ostentatious displays of wealth, well- or ill-gotten. At the very least, there’s the culture as well that calls for children to show respect, if not obeisance, to parents, at its extreme expressed in the proscription Huwag makialam sa usapan—and by extension, gawain—ng matatanda. Don’t butt into the affairs of your elders. At the very most, the remonstration entails a level of awareness from the kids that another culture, the culture of commercialism, which has become resolute in this day and age of malls, tends to dull. Though you never know: The child has been known to be father to the man, children have been known to see with more clarity than adults.
But I completely agree that we need to address the home front or culture that breeds corruption, firstly by seeing the ways it manifests itself. Chief of them—something I’ve been saying for some time now—is how we choose the godparents of our children for their baptisms and weddings. The point of having godparents on these occasions is to provide the children with role models or guides to light their path, or point them to the daang matuwid. But that doesn’t work in real life. The opposite does.
Almost unfailingly, we do not tap the
neighborhood public school teacher for it though we know him to be
reasonably honest. We know it because he lives modestly, or pretty much
according to his means, or his salary. We invite instead to be so our
boss, or the local politician, or the highways, customs, or police
official even though we know, or suspect, him to be unreasonably
dishonest. We know, or suspect, it because we see him flaunting wealth
that he could not possibly have gotten through his salary, even if his
spouse happens to be a good businessman or woman. Hell, we know that
because their children are driven to school in cars other than Ford or
Toyota with yayas in tow.
The first we have no use for, or pakinabang
from, he is just as poor as us, if not indeed poorer. The second we do,
he or she is critical to the future of our children, he can always
throw a bone their way as they navigate their way through life. The
poorer or more desperate we are, the more ardently we seek them. What
matters is not that they are honest, what matters is that they are big,
which almost guarantees they are corrupt. Bigness becomes the virtue in
and of itself. Between poor and honest and rich and corrupt, rich and
corrupt will trump poor and honest in choice of godparents 99.9 percent
of the time.
Yet again, at a personal level, we expect a
public official, particularly if he is kin or friend, to do something
for us, never mind if he screws other people. Otherwise he sucks, he’s
useless, walang pakinabang. In fact the official doesn’t have to be kin
or friend, as witness the horde that troops to City Hall at any given
day, expecting him or her to be a font of beneficence.
As one mayor put it to me: “Often enough,
it’s the constituents themselves that are forcing us to be corrupt.
During the last elections, because I wasn’t showering my constituents
with token basketball courts, my political rivals thought they could
lure them to their side by coming out with posters that said ‘Mayor L,
kuripot!’ I answered with posters of my own saying ‘Di bale nang
kuripot, ’wag lang kurakot.’ Thankfully, the voters still went for me.”
On a broader plane, we define a good public
official not as somebody who is honest but somebody who does something
for us however he rips off the world. You need look no further than the
Ilocos, which continues to regard Ferdinand Marcos as the best president
this country has ever had. Imelda routinely wins there, as does Imee,
and it’s enough of a “solid North” to make even Bongbong a senator. We
don’t mind that he’s an SOB so long as he’s our SOB.
I always tell the youth whenever I talk to
them to cherish their idealism, to fight to cling to their idealism.
That is not as easy as it sounds. Easy to be idealistic when you don’t
have a care in the world, when you’re free to be different or
rebellious. But you start having a family and you start hearing in
family gatherings yourself compared to the cousin or in-law who holds a
nice job, owns a nice house, and drives a nice car, and you stop looking
too closely at the goodness or badness, the rightness or wrongness, of
what it takes to make you impressive too, successful too, big too.
Tagle is right: Corruption, like charity,
begins at home. Except that the hardest thing to see is what’s right in
front of you, what’s right inside of you. By all means let’s rail
against corruption.
But let’s start, as Michael Jackson puts it, with the man in the mirror.
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