National Concerns

The country is going through so much turmoil right now. Sure, crime, corruption, poverty, and other concerns have been ongoing since forever in the Philippines, but the situation has been exacerbated by the jueteng and the Gloriagate scandals. (By the way, whatever possessed them to call it "Gloriagate"? Just because some USA controversies in the USA have "-gate" attached to their names? It might be a part of our fascination with America, so much so that we imitate even the negative things, but then again, that's just my opinion.) I'm not going to be a hypocrite and say that I'm really in love with the country, because I'm not. I don't consider myself to be a nationalist, but what's going on in the country probably has stirred the patriotic blood of the most jaded Filipino, or propel Juan de la Cruz to another country, like Canada.
I was thinking how the Philippines could have had such an unlucky past, present and possibly future, because throughout history, we've been feeling misery and suffering of some kind. Yeah, we could probably go and blame it on the fact that we're a third-world country (which is a better term to be used than "developing country" in this instance). Sure, we could go and say that it's because practically all of the people in the government are corrupt. The truth of the matter is that we're the ones who brought ourselves in the mess that we're in now. I'm not saying that we're responsible for everything that went wrong in our history. I mean, the Filipinos didn't go and wave a red flag or whatever when they sighted the Spanish galleons bearing Magellan and his crew so as to go and land in Cebu, right? (At least, I don't think they did) We blame the politicians, but who put them in their position of power except us? The President's authority is debatable right now given all that has happened (and I'm not stating that as an opinion but as fact), but what about everyone else? My brother says that one cultural problem of Filipinos is that we love to go blame everyone else but ourselves, and it's true. In Church, there's this prayer being said that Filipinos are wounded by political turmoil, conflict, and other issues, but there wasn't any mention about our own sins. I'm not trying to go against the Church or anything. Far from it. They probably did not deliberately gloss over the fact that we're all accountable for the events in the country, but the fact of the matter is, we can't continue blaming everyone else. All of us can go and do our part to improve the status of the Philippines. The main concept of the film "Pay It Forward" is that one person goes and does a good deed for another person, and tells the latter to pass the good deed on to another. Why can't we do that? The problem is that we're so apathetic that we'd go and think that it's not worth doing good because everyone else is acting horribly, so that no good thing ever happens. This is totally cliche, but we can, in our own small way, make our world a better place to live in. Who knows? Maybe one good deed can propel everyone else to do the same thing to the point that the good deed reaches the people in power and they do something good for the country and not only for themselves.
We were taught before an ideal structure for prayers. First, we pray for our country. Second, we pray for our family. Third, we pray for our Church/community. Fourth, we pray for our friends. Fifth, we pray for ourselves. Yes, that is in order. We're not supposed to put ourselves first above everything else, but the sad thing is that we're so incredibly selfish that we always act for our own good without caring about what our actions' possible consequences might be. We might not do it consciously and deliberately, but the thing is that our nature is always towards self-preservation, as according to Thomas Hobbes. The challenge is that we go against our nature and reach out to other people. Praying for our country might seem like a miniscule thing as compared to the millions of money being hoarded by corrupt politicians yearly, but trust me: it's a lot, because God is greater than those graft dudes. When I first tried praying in that structure a couple or so years ago, I initially thought that I wouldn't be able to say anything regarding the Philippines, but when i started, everything just spilled out. There are just so many things that we could pray for, and our own concerns would seem completely miniscule compared to what the country as a whole is going through. We criticize and complain and rant and rave about how horrible the Philippines is as a place to live in. The question is, are we going to do anything about it?