Visioning and Planning for Our Nation's Future:

FILIPINOS have had a more developed capability for describing societal problems and articulating complaints but a less developed capacity for formulating plans for solving them—plans that can be promoted to be widely desired and clearly doable. We have been choosing leader-figures based on our confidence in their honesty and sincere concern for the constituents, whether or not actual capacity for unifying and leading in constructive undertakings is validated. Before the next cycle starts, the constituents get disappointed and frustrated and are soon looking for another leader.

Capability to dream dreams is a basic human faculty; capability to dream dreams for the advancement of our society is a criterion for statesmanship; capability to dream dreams that actually get translated to reality to be enjoyed by the overwhelming majority of constituents, is a qualifying skill for effective leadership which takes full account of earlier development, current conditions, impeding factors, antidotes to the impeding factors (as observed in the past and current experiences), and a full determination or will power to implement, to learn, to improve and to succeed.

  Project Concept: 

Responsibly-Facilitated On-Line Discourse Process

All dreams are indications of a desired reality that is contrary to current conditions. But it does not help anybody so much to dream only idly and without lifting a finger to move towards its fulfillment. 

Merely having a dream with a sense of timeframe, and as energized by some concrete particulars (at least to boost confidence in it) helps to draw the energies of the universe, like the immeasureable energies of volunteering adherents, to move it tremendously from dream to plan to materialization.

Contents of Each Presentation

     Using a website dedicated to this project, we shall be asking a set of basic questions so a participating leader or would-be leader could describe his/her dream in basic summary form, promote its broad desirability among its actual stakeholders, and prove its doability within the next dozen years or so. Proving a plan's achievability entails pointing out the expected major obstacles and presenting plausible solutions to them, i.e., practical proactive steps to overcome each of them.     .

The entire presentation of both the desirability and achievability is expected to be rooted in in-depth historical analysis and sound current assessments of the patterns of thinking of the people. 

Aside from providing the main channel for the challenge and the specific questions, the website will also make available a webpage for each participant to present the diligently-prepared answers. It will also provide space for questions and comments from the site viewers and also a mechanism for viewers who would decide to volunteer to help carry the specific doable dream(s) to successful implementation.

Presentations From Youth, Others

The website will carry presentations from very young people to challenge the adult presentors, especially candidates for public office, to show that their plans are at least comparable to -- or better, as expected, than -- the younger people's doable dreams. 

Aside from the website, the project will also be using the many other tools made available by information and communication technologies to propagate its messages (including updates and summaries) and receive feedback. Toward the end of the year after Pistahang Kamalaysayan, the project will make arrangements for televised and/or live presentations by meritorious presentor-participants, complete with panels of reactors, volunteers, and endorsements.

All this work is to be done by a Project Team composed of people with varied facilitation, editorial, and cyber-management capabilities, appointed by a set of organizations with established credibility in the fields of history, futuristics and proper discourse facilitation. 

 Part of Pistahang Kamalaysayan-2: 

Aptness of Initiating Entity

Kamalaysayan is starting this project almost by itself and is also inviting other groups and institutions to be cooperating organizations to administer is together or at least start promoting it within the timeframe of this year’s Pistahang Kamalaysayan. The logic behind Kamalaysayan initiating this is that the project can aptly be described as a history-oriented one, considering that it bases itself on historical and current patterns of the people's mindsets and behavior, and  underscores the pro-active paradigm for determining or at least actively influencing the future collective life of a constituency. This will build clearer guideposts of present planning and decision-making for such dreams for the future to be realized. 

Short-Term Context 

It is fortuitous that during this period of the Second  and succeeding months, the country is undergoing preparations for electing the next set of leaders for national and local governance. Every constituency and, more so, the entirety of the nationwide one ought to include in its own collective preparation for the electoral exercise in May 2010 some measure of consensus-building on what they want to see in their lives in at least the next few years. The consensus formed would help them find the candidates most appropriate for such agenda, especially if candidates are also encouraged to volunteer their plans, their own respective “doable dreams” and be judged more intelligently on such basis. 

This will also liberate the concept of an “intelligent vote” away from the pitfalls of comparative academic records. More importantly, it will liberate our suffrage from the very unprincipled “bettors’ criterion” of the leading candidates’ campaigns invariably concentrating on comparative winnability ratings. If enough aspirants for the top national or local posts can be drawn in to start participating in this early enough, it can greatly increase the value of the ongoing “People’s Primaries” grassroots-based nominations process and various parallel moves.

Longer-Term Context 

The dreams to be presented in this project are supposed to be proven as achievable within a dozen years or so. By 2021, or exactly a dozen years from now, the Philippines will be completing 500 years from the time of the first colonial intrusion in our territory, with Ferdinand Magellan, after ending  European ignorance about these islands and people, and having started intervening in an internal conflict among local leaders, was stopped in his tracks by one of these local leaders, Rajah Lapu Lapu of Mactan.  Lapu-Lapu thus left with us a legacy 

-- a lesson about what to do  with foreigners who come here with illusions of superiority and designs for domination.

to read "A Serious Challenge to Our Would-be Leaders" click here

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