Exclaimed House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez when asked about the rift between his girlfriend and the girlfriend of Rep. Tony Floirendo Jr. — both politicians close friends of Digong from way back in Davao.
There have been mixed reactions to his statement, but its underlying premise is that having a mistress is the new normal in Congress.
How sad, the Integrated Bar of the Philippines and the Supreme Court have declared that lawyers like Speaker Alvarez are held to uphold higher standards of morals, revealing the wide gap between the ideal ethical standards, and reality in the highest leadership of the country.
Why have our ethical standards sunk so low? Is this the price of modernity?
“If one cannot be loyal to his family, then he cannot be loyal to anybody!” said Lee Kuan Yew, the great leader who built Singapore.
LKY required the highest standard of morality of all government officials, he had serious reservations about Western liberal democracy and lifestyle.
In part, this attitude stemmed from his own experience, but it also reflected a deeper philosophical aversion to ideologies.
As he liked to say, “The acid test is performance, not promises. The millions dispossessed in Asia care not and know not of theory. They want a better life. They want a more equal, just society.”
Lee enjoyed engaging American critics who insisted that without democracy, Singapore could not develop into an advanced economy.
In contrast, LKY argued that what most countries needed was discipline rather than democracy.
He noted that the U.S. had been building democracy. and giving aid to the Philippines for over a century. But he asked, “How many people from Singapore sought to leave it for the Philippines?”
Many people in the Philippines, he noted, even wanted to move to Singapore.
LKY demanded of leaders both intellectual and moral superiority.
Contrary to modern Western democratic theory that emphasizes citizens’ participation in governance, his views were closer to Plato’s conception of the “guardians” or China’s historical Mandarins.
Good government requires most of all leaders who put the public good unquestionably above their own personal interests.
LKY set a strict policy of non-acceptance against satire, crude jokes, or caricatures of himself and the leadership to increase the status and respect for politicians.
So what can we say? Here in our country, the self-inflicted private and intimate actions of the highest leaders of our nation — in scandalous proportions — are announced blatantly and without remorse by the politicians themselves!
Now who’s to blame for the crude remarks, lewd insinuations, and uncouth conduct resulting in the lack of discipline, declining status, and respect?
Is this a problem? That answer is no; people simply say: “We just follow the leader!”
Can we rise above all these? The answer is blowing in the wind.
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Author’s email: whelmayap@yahoo.com
