Speech
of
His Excellency Fidel V. Ramos
President of the Philippines
During the 99th Independence Day Flag-Raising Ceremony

[Delivered at Aguinaldo Shrine, Kawit, Cavite, June 12, 1997]

A community
of patriots

FOR MANY DECADES NOW—on this day and at this hour—Filipinos have turned toward this corner of Cavite, toward this balcony and this flag, to be reminded warmly of what being a Filipino means.

Many signal events have taken place since then—many seasons of peace and war, of feast and famine, of growth and struggle. In other words, we have been through both the best and the worst of times, as any people would have had to do—to mature, to prevail and to endure into another century of nationhood.

Unity in crisis

We have never been strangers to crisis and challenge. Whenever sacrifice and daring were called for by the circumstances, we stood ready and willing to give our all—our lives, if necessary. Ours was the first country to lead a successful anticolonial revolution in Asia and perhaps even in the entire Eastern world, in modern times. In 1986 we reaffirmed that commitment to liberty and to democracy by staging the world’s first People Power Revolution against a long-standing dictatorship.

Indeed, it may be true—as some observers have remarked—that the Filipino responds best in moments of the gravest crisis. In other words, it takes an emergency of national proportions to draw us together, to make us act in concert with one another, subsuming personal interest to the collective will and the collective good.

This was certainly true of the revolution of a century ago, when our founding heroes united and worked together—despite and above whatever personal or political differences they may have had among them—to liberate the nation from colonial slavery.

The vision and the will

The cohesiveness into which we are bound by crisis is certainly an admirable aspect of our national character. But we should not need to rely on the clear and present danger of a war, a national calamity, or overt despotism to appreciate the fact and the function of our nationhood.

And I say this because we stand on the threshold not only of the 21st century, and all the challenges and opportunities that it portends, but also of unprecedented progress and prosperity. If we keep on the path of economic reform and liberalization, the Philippines will emerge to claim its destiny as one of Asia’s capable economic performers.

We can do it because we have the resources, the talent, the industry and—albeit recently—the vision and the will to achieve our strategic objectives.

Even today we are surrounded by the signs of great and positive change—not only in the cities but in the countryside as well. Over the past five years we have been growing steadily and surely.

Securing our hard-won gains

But these hard-won gains can, once again, be very easily lost if we lapse into complacency—or succumb to the illusion that our most serious emergencies are behind us. We have come as far in these past five years as we had for many decades previously; but it will take very little to undo our accomplishments: if we give in to disunity, to pettiness, to the claims of short-term profit for a few over long-term gains for the many.

And then we shall not need a war to bring us defeat as a nation, for we shall have brought defeat upon ourselves.

Next year, as we mark our centennial of independence, we will have ample opportunity to take stock of what we have won and what we have learned as a free people. Also then, we will be deciding on how best to secure the transition from one century—and indeed, one way of life—to another.

It will be an exciting and a crucial year. But even now cannot be too soon to remind ourselves of our overriding interests and objectives as the nation that declared its freedom to think and to act for itself here at Kawit 99 years ago.

Partisan politics has a way of diminishing our sense of nationhood, and our sense of national accomplishment; we cannot—and must not—allow it to distract us from what we hold most valuable.

The imperative to unite and to cooperate remains as strong and as urgent as ever. The sobering reality is that millions of our poorest countrymen continue to live in crisis, still unable to share the growth enjoyed by others. If we need a cause to stake our nationhood upon, it is here, in the alleviation of the suffering and the hunger of the poor.

An infrastructure of the heart

No matter how many new high-rises we raise, no matter how many roads and bridges we build, we cannot claim to have succeeded as a modern society until we shall have dealt with the most basic needs of the common Filipino. The physical infrastructure, of course, is a way of dispersing and creating new health and opportunity; but we need as well an infrastructure of the heart, of compassion and commitment to social reform.

This will be the most salutary and the noblest use we can make of our freedom: to raise up not only ourselves but others. Let us draw on some of our oldest and truest values as Filipinos: pagkakaisa, pagtutulungan, katapatan, pagpupunyagi and the other positive attributes exemplified by our heroes.

Thereby, let us become the sambayanan—the one people, the community of patriots—that our nation’s founders envisaged us to be.