What will you do about it?

By Joseph Ladrido

Activism was never for me. Many of the things that we believe in and fight for are, in many ways, shaped by our experiences and how we choose to act on these experiences. As a finance person and economic observer, my focus had always been on how to grow things, attract investments, and stimulate economic growth.

Over time, nuance has embedded itself into my Wall Street analyst. Economic growth should not be pursued just for its sake but more for how it can alleviate poverty and the suffering of the many who are already disadvantaged from birth via the nexus of their social standing and economic means.

Like high blood pressure, which is dubbed the silent killer, the overriding form of silent discrimination in our country can best be described by the seemingly innocuous question: “Kay sin-o ka bata?” or its equivalents, “Kaninong anak ka?” “Are you the son/daughter of X?” Your answer pretty much places you in a box from which perception about your relative importance in our world is determined. Sad, unfair, and totally wrong. This social exclusivity explains a lot of why our country has fallen from the ranks of the relatively wealthy up to the early ’60s to one which cannot even rise to being a high middle-income country.

Then there is the economic inequality, where we have taken as a given that the majority of our population is labeled as poor. We are good at tracking these numbers, but our policy approaches are shallow, insincere, and designed to fail.

And now we have climate change and its real impacts. The effects will not only render a narrow-minded focus on economic growth futile but, more so, devastating to the poor. The goal of attracting investments and stimulating economic growth will come to nothing when these investments and “growth drivers” fall beneath rising sea levels in the near future.

Yet our politicians remain true to form, fighting among themselves. The problems of our world have become complex, but the political class and their enablers in the economic elite have remained medieval. We are doubly hampered by the need to dig ourselves out of a hole created by bad decisions, policy failures, the nature of governance, and the primal goal of being powerful and remaining so in our country.

Outward and public personas feign concern for the issues that matter most to our people. The record—or in current lingo, “resibo”—is a more real reflection of the “lip service” that these really are.

And what about us? Puro tayo dahil, dapat, sana, etc. All the excuses and complaints that you can think of. The political class has failed us, and if we continue to rely on the crutch of blaming others, then nothing is going to change.

So ang tanong – anong gagawin mo?

The author is a former Wall Street analyst and corporate executive, among other feathers and belts.