Small is beautiful
Published Sep 8, 2022 12:02 am
MEDIUM RARE
Jullie Y. Daza
Mahatma Gandhi said it, later adopted for business by Tiffany’s and De Beers. The best things come in small packages, indeed.
"Build, Build, Build" was a monumental success for the Duterte administration. The present dispensation under President Marcos is now asking for a budget of ₱1.2 trillion to “Build Better, More”. How about we also “Build Small, Build Faster”?
Not every infrastructure project needs to be a jaw-dropping game-changer, for as BBM said in his own State of the Nation Address on July 25, we want more health centers and specialty hospitals for a stronger healthcare system, like Heart Center, Lung Center, Kidney Transplant Institute, Children’s Medical Center “and we need them not only in the National Capital Region,” an observation that rallied his audience to their feet, the first in a series of standing ovations to punctuate his 76-minute speech.
When he met with Filipino expats in Singapore last Tuesday, he assured them of state support for their families in the form of scholarships, housing, and healthcare, a promise that was greeted with cheers (and tears streaking down one lady’s cheek, as shown in closeup on TV).
To small people like the majority of the 110 million of us, health matters, as does education, as does housing, and these will not cost as much as railways, subways, highways, airports and ports, which is not to say that they’re not essential, but if the national government can afford to build more of the big-ticket projects, surely it can pick up the slack – while consuming less time – on small stuff like more classrooms, desks, schoolhouses; more rural health units so patients won’t have to travel far (as BBM sympathetically noted in his SONA); residential centers for solo parents, wow!; and, for our expats, simplifying the OFW handbook from 204 sections on rules to 100.
Little things mean a lot to the small people in whom deprivation resides as a heartache that they are afraid to pass on to their sons and daughters. What does a budget in the trillions of pesos mean to someone who cannot feed his family on ₱500 a day even when education is free, new hospitals can wait, and owning a house is owning a slice of the moon?
Jullie Y. Daza
Mahatma Gandhi said it, later adopted for business by Tiffany’s and De Beers. The best things come in small packages, indeed.
"Build, Build, Build" was a monumental success for the Duterte administration. The present dispensation under President Marcos is now asking for a budget of ₱1.2 trillion to “Build Better, More”. How about we also “Build Small, Build Faster”?
Not every infrastructure project needs to be a jaw-dropping game-changer, for as BBM said in his own State of the Nation Address on July 25, we want more health centers and specialty hospitals for a stronger healthcare system, like Heart Center, Lung Center, Kidney Transplant Institute, Children’s Medical Center “and we need them not only in the National Capital Region,” an observation that rallied his audience to their feet, the first in a series of standing ovations to punctuate his 76-minute speech.
When he met with Filipino expats in Singapore last Tuesday, he assured them of state support for their families in the form of scholarships, housing, and healthcare, a promise that was greeted with cheers (and tears streaking down one lady’s cheek, as shown in closeup on TV).
To small people like the majority of the 110 million of us, health matters, as does education, as does housing, and these will not cost as much as railways, subways, highways, airports and ports, which is not to say that they’re not essential, but if the national government can afford to build more of the big-ticket projects, surely it can pick up the slack – while consuming less time – on small stuff like more classrooms, desks, schoolhouses; more rural health units so patients won’t have to travel far (as BBM sympathetically noted in his SONA); residential centers for solo parents, wow!; and, for our expats, simplifying the OFW handbook from 204 sections on rules to 100.
Little things mean a lot to the small people in whom deprivation resides as a heartache that they are afraid to pass on to their sons and daughters. What does a budget in the trillions of pesos mean to someone who cannot feed his family on ₱500 a day even when education is free, new hospitals can wait, and owning a house is owning a slice of the moon?