Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Barack's budget priorities and Pinoy's Stagnancy


I just watched Obama's second prime-time news conference and there was this question that gave me nostalgia of how our country was decades ago.

The question voices out the critic on White House budget which focus on education, health-care, and energy. The answer of Obama clearly shows what made him win the presidential elections: improving education, health-care and energy makes people grow.

This made me remember of how we were as a country. Decades ago, I remember going to IRRI for our field trip. I remember seeing the research done by the institute. I remember seeing many Thai and other foreigners that were at the institute to learn about IRRI's findings. Now, Thailand is one of the leading exporter of rice in the world. We, however, have become one of the biggest importers. The "teacher" has been surpassed by her "student". What happened?

Let's face it. One of the reasons for this is that Filipinos have gone stagnant. Science and technology evolved around us while we are concerned with politics. There are two reasons that I believed caused this. One, the government priorititized giving people food (not to mention robbing people's money lol) and Two, people became too contented of living the way they were living. In very simple terms, the people and the government have focused on picking food from the tree and not how to plant the tree. We rely on the "environment" providing us our food rather than producing it ourselves. When food runs out and no one helps us, we are dead.
For instance, I believe that signing international business agreements to find our workers jobs is not a good idea. We are now a country running on OFW remittance because of this. I hate that we are the world's source of laborers, maids and factory workers. We've become soooo dependent to other countries.

I just dread the day when our country becomes a bunch of "stone-age" people watching political drama in TV after a day of being slaves to "high-tech" foreigners.

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