IS OUR COUNTRY GOING TO BE ALL RIGHT?

"Is our country going to be all right?" Jose Rizal answers Chino's question. "We must deserve our freedom," he says, "by improving the mind and enhancing the dignity of the individual, loving what is just."

Improving the mind?

Do the public schools to which you don't send your children "improve the mind?"

Enhancing the dignity of the individual?

Does the running social sore that is Tondo and the long wound of the Cavite coastal road with its thousands of squatters enhance the dignity of man? Or degrade it?

Loving what is just?

Do we love what is just? Do we have even the slightest care for it? Will the seas continue to take their dreadful toll? Will "salvage" be the most used word in our lexicon? Will Evelio Javier rest unavenged? And Rolando Olalia? And Lean Alejandro?

"Is our country going to be all right?"

Rizal continues, "So long as the Filipino people do not have sufficient courage to proclaim their right to a life of their own, as long as we see our countrymen ashamed in their private consciences while in public they keep silent at oppression, so long as they wrap themselves in selfishness and praise the most despicable acts, while they beg for a share in the spoils, so long as this is true," asks Rizal, "what right do we have to freedom?"