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22 Willing The Means to Achieve the Goals

One thing can be said immediately of the Philippine peasants: historically, they have used all means at their command in a struggle to achieve their ends. Through the centuries they have engaged in armed struggle, resorted to strikes, mass rallies, demonstrations, boycotts, and, during the brief period of liberal democracy from 1946 to 1972, they combined ballot offensives with bullet defensives.

They realize, too, that their main weakness has been the chronic inability to forge a truly national peasant movement: national in scope and membership. In addition, the chief weakness has been the uneven pace of radicalization among the important would-be support groups from the non-peasant sectors. During the past ten years, these two main weaknesses have been gradually' corrected but not, as yet, completely.

The peasants’ spirit of tenacity, however, is matchless. For as Mang Tito says, quoting the Bible: “Only they who persevere

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to the end will be saved.” Some of us are a bit crazy, he quips. In undertaking a 50-kilometer journey there are those who have been strong enough to walk 47 kilometers and suddenly give up because they are so tired. Crazy, when there are only three kilometers more to go!

The prime task remains the same: to build strong people’s organizations, and to build this on a firm ideological basis. We must build on rock and not on sand, Mang Tito says, again and again. When the rains fall, and the floods come, and the winds blow and beat upon our house, it will not fall if it is built on rock.

And we must pay more attention now to our planning process, Mang Tito continues. Or we might become like that man in Christ’s story who started to build but could not finish because he was too lazy to make a painstaking assessment of the situation.

We have to learn from our mistakes, Mang Tito says, and confess these mistakes in our criticisms and self-criticisms. The just man falls seven times a day, meaning, he also rises as many times.

All throughout our work, our vision must be like the hawk’s even as our struggle is like the ant’s. We cannot cheat ourselves about the immensity of the tasks nor can we afford to lose faith in our God-given strengths.