The Filipino and values

Randy David, my favorite op-ed columnist in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, writes about the new Presidential Commission on Values Formation. He certainly hits the spot:

Our Constitution's Declaration of Principles and State Policies may be read as a litany of our nation's core values. Yet the conduct of our national life is antithetical to almost everything the Constitution celebrates. We don't take our constitutional values seriously. It is obvious that enshrining them in the nation's basic charter does not guarantee their realization. The problem is not their lack of clarity. The problem is their irrelevance to our national life.

The fault is not in the values themselves, or in our genes or stars. It is simply that the conditions that make it possible for us to live up to our Constitution's value aspirations are not there. We actually live by another set of values that are more congenial to the kind of society we are, more feudal than democratic, more traditional than modern, reflecting the social instincts of a highly unequal and underdeveloped nation.

Read with Peter Wallace's Report (June 2004), David's article certainly puts a lot of things into perspective.

I've been trying to find ways to publish The Wallace Report on this blog. It's kinda long and incorporates graphs.