WATCHING GLOBAL events and developments is stressful especially when I see the effects on the country today and what tomorrow could be. What we’re seeing and experiencing today took years to broil. There were all kinds of push and pull efforts – to push for all kinds of conflict and to pull away from all those.
The pushes are winning and what I see coming isn’t good at all. In simplistic terms, it’s all about ambition, greed and power – the status quo fighting to retain the international order it created versus countries wanting to break free and create a new order. Asymmetric warfare is now culminating in kinetic warfare.
It’s creating for the world a great deal of high risk and trepidation. For us, we’re at our most vulnerable as the current administration exits while a new one is on-boarding, after which it will take perhaps another year to firmly settle down. This is the time when risk, emergency and crisis management will be needed most.
We’ve been feeling the pain of inflation from supply shortages, especially food and energy due to supply chain dislocations, production disruptions and curtailed movement of people, goods and services caused by trade wars, currency wars, the pandemic, embargos, proxy wars and military shadow boxing.
But government being what it is, national and local, given its state of disrepair and proven incapacity that couldn’t be reversed through time; and society being generally divided, clueless and helpless – left to its own devices by the political and economic elite – fatalism and defeatism hang overhead.
Even a new administration with a team of rivals and well-chosen cabinet members will take time to gel given their deep divisions. Can they rise above themselves and work as a team overnight to protect, defend, and promote the national interest, and deliver performance excellence so needed in these perilous times?
Some of us share this view, others don’t, many more no longer care because no matter who’s in charge their lives haven’t gotten better; the country’s inter-generational problems like corruption, poverty and injustice remain constant. Yet, apathy’s the last thing we need at this dangerous junction in our nationhood.
The new administration campaigned on the slogan of unity. But it didn’t define what we should be uniting FOR and AGAINST. It’s time to spell it out because unity is what will save the country from collapse – unity for a transformed society and government, unity against all the forces that prevent it.
That’s hoping for two miracles, two impossible dreams to be achieved overnight in the world’s darkening hours before we feel the full impact of the coming storm. This will require leadership in all levels of governance and society for those of us in positions of influence and power to work above and beyond the call of duty.
Whether one is elected or appointed or by choice, leadership should now be demonstrated at home, in the community, in workplaces and halls of power for the long pull, to get us out of trouble and lift us up to levels we never thought possible. This is what we must do now, not tomorrow, to survive and prosper.
We need to be HEROIC!
Rafael M. Alunan III
