By Donella Meadows
–July 31, 1986–
“Why have the media in your country started saying negative things about Cory Aquino?” asked my friend Maria, visiting from the Philippines. “They say she is weak, but I think I have never before seen such strength. Don’t people see that Cory is a new kind of leader?”
What do you mean, a new kind of leader?
“She operates not with force but with love. She doesn’t polarize, she integrates. She maintains the peoples’ respect not with a grand life-style, but with integrity.”
That’s all so abstract. Can you be specific?
“Cory took all her ministers to Davao City, the stronghold of the communist rebels. She went not to pontificate, but to listen, and she made her ministers listen. They met with everyone — rebels, tribal people, farmers, police. They had workshops in which the people talked and the government listened. Some people say that Cory has been in power seven months and still hasn’t revealed her Plan. But she is not the kind of leader who makes a Plan and lays it on the people. She derives her plan FROM the people.”
“Cory worries that her power will create a shell around her, separating her from reality. She is trying to be sure that won’t happen. She has a monthly call-in television program — not censored, not staged — where anyone can tell her anything.”
“She puts cabinet meetings on television live so the people can watch their ministers at work. How many leaders have the courage to do that? She says there should be no secrets between the government and the people.”
“She knows better than to take the pro-Marcos demonstrations seriously. She knows how strong our revolution was, how it was created by the people and is firmly based in our hearts. She refuses to arrest pro-Marcos demonstrators, because they are mostly poor people being paid 100 pesos, 200 pesos, to march. She says the marches should go on as long as possible, to get some Marcos money back to the poor. She has the confidence to let opposing voices speak.”
“Of course sometimes she makes mistakes and reverses course. When that happens she admits it publicly. She explains what happened, what she learned, and what she’s going to try next. I don’t think admitting uncertainty is weak. I think it takes more strength to tell the truth and correct your mistakes than it does to pretend you have all the answers.”
“She has had only seven months now to reverse the damage of twenty years of Marcos. Of course there are still big problems, but the healing has begun.”
“After so much fear for so long, people now know they can speak out about anything. Since the revolution 26 new newspapers have started up in Manila.”
“My sister works at a bank, and she says that in the first week after Marcos left, $300 million in dollars were exchanged for pesos. Since then $900 million more have come in, mostly in small bills. People had been hoarding dollars because they had no faith in the government or the economy. Now they are returning those dollars.”
“Civil servants now wear a little pin. They call it ‘Operasyon Walang Lagay’, the no-bribe movement. When we go to get a drivers’ license or a customs permit and we see that pin, we know we don’t need to slip money under the table. It wasn’t Cory’s idea — it happened spontaneously.”
“On the two sugar-growing islands of Negros, where there are large estates and a lot of people living in poverty, the landlords, led by Cecy Magsaysay, are undertaking a land-reform movement. They are giving their workers deeds to land and working with them to develop subsistence and cash crops, markets and credit. This movement is also spontaneous.”
“Many of the rebels of the New Peoples’ Army are laying down their guns. They were against Marcos more than they were for communism. Cory calls them ‘rebel returnees’ and gives them amnesty. The rebel leaders are waiting to see what will happen. Many of the injustices that fueled their movement are gone. It’s too early to be sure, but I think they will become a small, legal communist party, like the ones in Europe, with very little popular support.”
“These changes look like miracles to us — they are such reversals of the constant corruption and fear we had been living in. Most of them happen not because Cory decrees them, but because she stands firmly for the decent social order we have all been wanting for so long. She knows that WE create the social order, not her. She expects us to create a good one, and we are beginning to do it.”
“Cory is a leader without self-interest, a leader who sincerely cares about the welfare of her country. Everything she does is sensible and obvious — obvious to us women, anyway. She has the strength to be simple and honest in a cynical world where leadership is equated with force and deception.”
“So why all the criticism? Because she doesn’t behave as other more authoritarian leaders do? Because her kind of leadership is threatening to those other leaders? Because she is too good to be true? Too good for our disillusioned modern minds to believe?”
“Well, all of us who lived under Marcos know about cynicism and disillusionment. Everything that happened during our revolution was too good to believe. But it happened. So now I am willing to believe we could have a leader as different, as humble and human, as strong as Cory Aquino. Rather than doubt or criticize her kind of leadership, I prefer to support and emulate it.”
Copyright Donella Meadows Institute 2011
