Rp Rizal free essay sample

Towards Community in a Doomed World: Rediscovering Rizal’s Prophetic Vision in the Age of Peak Oil and Global Warming 1 By Floro Quibuyen Because my talk addresses the future, I wish to dedicate it to my 10-year old daughter Ligaya and her generation. They will be inheriting the mess that their elders have created. On their shoulders rests the impossible job of atoning for the sins of their fathers and mothers. Perhaps the best tribute to Rizal has been said by Apolinario Mabini. In his lonely exile, compelled to live in Guam for refusing to submit to the conquering Americans, a militant nationalist to the core, Mabini pondered on the failure of the Revolution and remembered Rizal: In contrast to Burgos who wept because he died guiltless, Rizal went to the execution ground calm and even cheerful, to show that he was happy to sacrifice his life, which he had dedicated to the good of all Filipinos, confident that in love and gratitude they would always remember him and follow his example and teaching. In truth the merit of Rizal’s sacrifice consists precisely in that it was voluntary and conscious. †¦ From the day Rizal understood the misfortunes of his native land and decided to work to redress them, his vivid imagination never ceased to picture to him at every moment of his life the terrors of the death that awaited him; thus he learned not to fear it, and had no fear when it came to take him away; the life of Rizal, from the time he dedicated it to the service of his native land, was therefore a continuing death, bravely endured until the end for love of his countrymen.God grant that they will know how to render to him the only tribute worthy of his memory: the imitation of his virtues (Mabini, The Philippine Revolution, trans by Leon Ma. Guerrero 1969, 45; emphasis mine). Indeed we have a lot to learn from Rizal’s example, and on this bright Sunday morning I wish to share with you some relatively unexplored facets in Rizal’s life that I think can help us navigate our way through our present predicament, both globally and Updated from author’s Annual Rizal Day Lecture on 30 December 2007, 8am, at Fort Santiago, Intramuros Manila.Sponsored by the National Historical Institute. 1 1 locally. These are: 1) his 1890 essay, Filipinas dentro de cien anos, 2) his concept of the nation, 3) his Dapitan years, and 4) his hitherto unnoticed minor study on Oceania. I will try to relate all four to the impending global catastrophes that the Philippines and the world will be facing in the next 30 years—global warming and peak oil. The media has finally taken notice of global warming, although scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades. But peak oil is hardly mentioned in the media.I recently asked a highly educated and most articulate young congressman if peak oil is being discussed at all in congress and his reply was, What is peak oil? It is the codename for the inevitable decline of petroleum upon reaching peak production and it forebodes the end of industrial civilization. We are facing that crisis within 30 years. 90% of us will still be around when that happens. And definitely for our children and their children, our grandchildren, that is the world that they will inherit. One virtue of Rizal that’s most cogent for our time is his courage to see behind the veils of comfortable illusions and confront the future.This he demonstrated in his groundbreaking essay Filipinas Dentro de Cien Anos, arguably the most important essay of the Solidaridad. Indeed, it stands alone in Filipino nationalist literature. I know of no other work by a Filipino scholar that envisions the Philippines in one hundred years. If you have not read anything on Rizal, and you have time for only one essay, I urge you to read Filipinas dentro de cien anos. This essay antedates an emerging academic discipline that we now call Futuristics or Futures Studies that is being offered for the first time in my school, the Asian Center at University of the Philippines in Diliman. On the strength 2 of his essay, Rizal ought to be called the father of Philippine futuristics. On the basis of a careful analysis of the historical forces—both local and global— impinging on the Philippines towards the 1890s and through a series of logical steps or arguments involving disjunctive syllogisms, Rizal comes up with the most likely scenario for the Philippines within one hundred years. I’ll summarize his lengthy essay by focusing on his three basic arguments or theses.His first point recapitulates his Morga thesis (the argument in his annotations to Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las isles Filipinas): Soon after being incorporated in the crown of Spain, [Filipinas] had to support with her blood and the vigor of her sons the wars and imperialistic ambitions of the Spanish nation. In these struggles, in these terrible crisis of peoples when they change government, laws, usages, customs, religion, and beliefs, the Philippines was depopulated, impoverished, and retarded, astounded by her metamorphosis, with no more confidence in her past, still without faith in her future. . . Then began a new era for the Filipinos; little by little they lost their old traditions, the mementos of their past; they gave up their writing, their songs, their poems, their laws in order to learn by rote other doctrines which they did not understand, another morality, another aesthetics different from those inspired by their climate and their manner of thinking.Then they declined, degrading themselves in their own eyes; they became ashamed of what was their own; they began to admire and praise whatever was foreign and incomprehensible; their spirit was dismayed and it surrendered (Political and Historical Writings of Jose Rizal National Historical Institute, 130-31). Then Rizal strikes a hopeful note and brings up his second point. Surveying the present trend, Rizal declares: Futures Studies or Futuristics was first instituted in 1975 as the M.S Program in Studies of the Future at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, and in 1976 as the M. A Program in Public Policy in Alternat ive Futures at the Political Science Department of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. One of the founding fathers of Futures Studies is Johann Galtung. Having been exposed to this discipline as a Political Science doctoral student of the U. H, I proposed the course to the Asian Center.It was approved by the university council of U. P in the first semester of school year 2007-08. 2 3 Today there is a factor which did not exist before. The national spirit has awakened, and a common misfortune and a common abasement have united all the inhabitants of the Islands. It counts on a large enlightened class within and without the Archipelago, a class created and augmented more and more thanks to the official provocations and the system of persecution.