The Relevance of Rizal Today

This comment appears to be a boondoogle than anything else. The novels of Jose Rizal are irrelevant to the conditions of a globalized world where money, goods and peoples move unhindered compared to the 19th century. Jose Rizal was a product of his times with totally different dynamics on how societies, caste system and economic-political realities were organized and implemented that made him write those two novels of fiction. While there may appeared to be similarities to his characters and transactional dynamics between the rulers and the ruled it is not the general rule for today.

What is there to learn from among the Thais, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Indonesians and the so-called tiger economies of a small part of Asia without understanding we live in a very diffferent world. The tagalogs and its tagalized subject nations have all the tools, the institutions and ideas to better their country economically and yet they failed. Why look elsewhere for answers to countries and cultures whose paramters and societies were organized differently than in the Philipppines.

What else is there to learn from lessons of the "tiger economies" which the tagalogs and its tagalized subject nations already knew. The tagalogs and its tagalized subject nations have been trying to learn from its neighbors for many generations and still nothing substantive happened.

I read sometime ago that the two legs of the Philippine economy were consumer spending and export of labor. How does this relate to the tiger economies and whose economic structure are different from what every tagalog/tagalized leadership already knew that living on debt is not going to be sustainable in the long run. What are they going to imitate this time and pretend this "learning", which I call dependency to an outside source, is finally going to save them from themselves and is relevant to Jose Rizal.

On the contrary Jose Rizal seemed to suggest that real Filipinos should look inward and work on from there and not throw out the baby with the bathwater despite the seeming differences of his world to this one as we already know. If "relevance" is to be made then this is the lesson.

the Spear