Speech of Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph G. Recto
SMX Mall of Asia, 30 June 2018

Good evening to all of you.

I am honored and happy to be with the people who account for about half of the country’s GNI – or Gross National Intelligence.

Let me assure you that I will not be a partypooper tonight who will spoil your revelry with a privilege speech.

I will stay within the 8 minutes allotted to me, even though imposing it on a senator is like telling an alcoholic to limit himself to a teaspoon of beer.

I have made a mental note on the need for brevity as contemporary Philippine speeches are classified into three : brief remarks, looong speeches, and presidential homilies on the gospel according to Digong.
Because tonight is about remembrances, let me share mine.

I got married 25 years ago, and I had a wonderful honeymoon because I spent it alone – as a US State Department IVLP grantee touring America.

My coast-to-coast itinerary brought me to the prairies of Nebraska, a swing to the Corn Belt, into the heart of the Rust Belt in Ohio and Michigan, to the cobblestone roads of Boston, and two big swamps – Everglades and Washington.

Because we were given briefing upon briefing, it was a trip that expanded my knowledge, and because we were plied with food, and my waist as well, that I went home with a 30-pound excess luggage – 10 in my bag and 20 in my body.

It was an exposure I would recommend to lawmakers, and perhaps the US Embassy people, as a counterweight to Beijing’s charm offensive, can initiate two programs for members of Congress.

You can invite senators for the Halfbright program, and for members of the House, the Notbright fellowship.

My dear friends :

The Philippine-American exchange program we are celebrating today actually began long before Senator Fullbright launched his after the war.

The pensionado system antedates it by more than 40 years. Like Fullbright’s, it was also designed as part of war reconstruction, in the belief that the cornerstone of the nation can only be as strong as the people who lay it, and its building blocks can only rise as high as the talent and the lofty ideals of those who pile them.

And the chosen few who were blessed to be part of it, like you, came home to enrich our nation, whether as scientists who battled disease and hunger, or artists who nourished our soul, or engineers who built the scaffolding of progress, or teachers who shone the light of knowledge, or apostles of justice and good governance who taught a fledging republic the greatest app civilization ever invented : the rule of law.

Your contracts, with both the governments who sent and received you, obligated you to go back and to give back to the people.

But I know that through your deeds, you have paid it in full and in fact have amortized more than what was required.

But the gift of excellence carries with it the burden of lifetime servitude, because the creation of a fair society is a work in progress, and government has to continually live up to what Hubert Humphrey, on whose honor one of the programs is named after, once said as the moral test of government, “of how government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”

Or kung sa Pilipinas ngayon, pwede idagdag ang “those who have been sideswept into the gutters of life, the tambays without jobs, families without homes, and the descamisados.”

You were meant to be the bridges between two peoples. But your people expected you to be their bridges to the future, to narrow the gap of inequality, and close the fissures of discontent.

And nowhere is that task more urgent than here today, when we face the spectre of adding 17.5 million Filipinos to our population within 10 years.

I arrived here 40 minutes ago, and by this time, 136 babies would have been born in this country. Babymaking is one Philippine industry that is recession-proof.

By 2027, there will be 120.1 million crowding this sliver of land that typhoons hit first but investors choose last.

We are adding the population of one Singapore every 3 years and 4 months.

On education alone, 40 babies born in less than 10 minutes would mean one classroom, one teacher, books, chair that would easily cost us P3 million.

Paano pa ang pagkain? Each Filipino on the average eats 108 kilos of rice annually because there is an unli-rice gene in our DNA.

Yung 136 Pinoys born in the last 40 minutes will devour 14.7 tons of rice yearly. To produce this, we have to open up 6 hectares of land to irrigation, the size of about 129 basketball courts, at a cost of P1.97 million.

What am I trying to drive at?

The screaming headlines and the most incensing memes that divide us are not this country’s main problems. Bad policies wreak more havoc than blasphemy. What is essential is invisible to the trolls.

Kaya kayong mga pinagpala, hindi pa tapos ang inyong trabaho. One can retire from work, but never from one’s passionate advocacy.

Sabi nga ni Ted Kennedy, in whose honor one of the programs is named after : “The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

See you in the trenches.

Thank you and good evening.