is very hard. The recent movie by Brillante Mendoza about “Ma’ Rosa” highlights this (Variety article). A sari-sari store owner sells shabu on the side, gets caught and her children have to raise money to get her out of the hands of corrupt police. Haven’t watched this movie yet, but many other Mendoza movies like Kinatay, Lola, Serbis and Tirador – so I can call him today’s Lino Brocka. His portrayals of social ills are searingly realistic, and it could be that for all necessary economic and administrative measures, Daang Matuwid did not give enough focus to that aspect of things.
President-elect Duterte has mentioned the issue of poor people selling shabu on the side and police protecting drug lords, I have read some articles as well about sari-sari store owners caught selling shabu, so the stuff is realistic. The Philippines seems to have an issue with drugs. Rapid modernization is probably too much for many, especially those not equipped for the new order of things. I have seen this happen myself in the decades of transition here in Germany with private television, mobile phones, Internet, social media and a more dynamic but also riskier economic order coming. Some people did not adjust that well.
Germany transitioned from the stuffy small town thinking of the Adenauer and Kohl eras to a more modern country, and I am happy about it. But I am also happy that there are still curfews for certain things. Such as curfews for young people with their parents potentially liable, contained in the Federal Law called the Protection of Young Persons Act (link). Even if it is obviously not always implemented as strictly as in the times of Konrad Adenauer, (West) German Chancellor who was Mayor of Cologne before the war. Or even in the times of Chancellor Kohl, son of a mayor.
I am happy about Noise Protection Laws which are a matter for each Federal State, especially on nights were I have to get travel the next day. No loud noise after 10 p.m. or police can even come. Discos and pubs have to stop serving outside even in summer, people have to move inside and they have to implement appropriate noise protection to not disturb neighbors. Especially not those who have to get up very early – like the bus drivers, the factory workers, the bakers, the butchers of the Munich slaughterhouse and the men who move crates in the Munich wholesale market.
Cito Beltran has written that small-town thinking is needed sometimes (link): “Our national epidemic is we have become a nation of self-entitled individuals who demand more than we contribute.“. Certainly small-town thinking helped stabilize Germany after the chaotic 1920s, a false savior named Hitler and the Second World War. The Adenauer era was considered stuffy but people got down to do their work of rebuilding the country – avoiding disorder like in much of Eastern Europe after Communism, or abuses of freedom in the times after Marcos in the Philippines.
Before Willy Brandt – former Governing Mayor of (West) Berlin which is both a City and a Federal State, said “mehr Demokratie wagen” as Chancellor – “dare more democracy“, there was the boring and stuffy Adenauer Era where people got used to a certain self-discipline, internalized it. Kohl reloaded the Adenauer era a little bit, taking back a few excesses of the 1970s, Schröder was a representative of the Spaßgesellschaft (Fun Society) late 90s early noughties, some excesses of which Merkel took back. So it is about finding the right balance. May the Philippines find its own.
Irineo B. R. Salazar, München, 21 May 2016