ONCE more the latest Social Weather Stations survey results show that we Filipinos are the greatest when it comes to possessing hope rather than fear.
The SWS news release announcing these results leads with the buoyant words: “Despite the
turbulence that characterized 2011, 95% of Filipinos still face the coming year with hope rather than with fear.”
Once more we are proving to be children of Hope and Happiness. Adherents of Jesus Christ’s frequent call to his disciples: “Do not be afraid.” Do not be people shaken with fear, made anxious by doubt.
Hope has a great psychic value. It also has an economic and material value. It makes workers, executives, athletes and math-driven gamblers work harder and achieve more than those who are fearful, anxious and unsure of themselves.
This high optimism, says SWS, “matches the all-time high hope level registered in 2002. It is also two points higher than the previous survey.”
The SWS first did this hope-versus-fear poll in December 2000. Hope for the coming year has thereafter been at high levels since then.
This survey was conducted on December 3 to 7, 2011, using face-to-face interviews of 1,200 adults in Metro Manila, the Balance of Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao.
SWS says: “Interestingly, hope is widespread, with record-highs in Metro Manila and Mindanao. It stayed at record-high 96 percent in Metro Manila. In Mindanao, hope increased by five points to 94 percent. This record-high was first reached in 2002.”
The hope level hardly changed in the Visayas, from a record-high 97 percent in 2010 to 96 percent in 2011, and in Balance Luzon, from 94 percent to 95 percent.”
This sentiment can also be seen in all socio-economic classes. The very poor class E registered a new record-high of 93 percent from 89 percent last year.
“New Year hope also stayed at record-high 97 percent among the middle to upper classes ABC.
“It hardly changed among the masa class D, from 95 percent to 96 percent.”
Hope in Christian theology
Hope is not only a positive force for productivity among workers, executives, athletes and gamblers.
Hope is one of the three theological virtues of Christianity. The theological virtues are faith, hope and charity. These virtues are supernaturally infused by God into the soul of the faithful to make him or her capable of acting the way His children should and thus merit eternal life.
Says the Catechism: Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.
God has placed in the human heart the aspiration to happiness. The virtue of hope responds to that aspiration to happiness. It takes up the hopes that inspire men’s activities (including the hope we hold in the turbulent last days of 2011 that there will be a better life in 2012). This virtue of hope helps keep the faithful person aspire to be pure because his most important objective is to dwell in the everlasting happiness of being with God. It keeps man from being defeated by discouragement. It sustains him during times of abandonment. It opens up his heart to the happiness of looking forward to the eternal beatitude.
Hope buoys a man up from the vice of selfishness and leads him to acts of charity (love of God and doing what will please Him and others) from which happiness flows.
This hope that Filipinos always have must come from their infused virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity. For only a person who absolutely believes in God’s presence, has no doubt whatsoever that God’s providence will always preserve him and those he loves. And he would then have that kind of hope that SWS surveys have found year in and year out for 11 years.
For this kind of hope to be in the heart and mind of 95 percent of the Filipinos in the SWS national sample of respondents can only mean that by and large our people will never be defeated by calamities, bad governance, massive poverty and whatever challenges might be up ahead of us.
It means that given the right kind of leadership, we Filipinos will really become a great and Godly nation of achievers. People who will do their best and act with charity (love) to each other because that is the way to act out of love for God while we are in this world.
Tops in human happiness index
And this too is the underlying reason we are always somewhere at or near the top in the Human Happiness Index.
Even in the modified surveys and research to gauge national happiness — modified by the United Nations to include mathematically measurable levels of development — we fare rather well. In the UN statistical research of humankind’s development level and happiness in which wealth, education and other materialist factors used in gauging the GDP were included, we Filipinos were found to be in the medium-developed nations, not at the bottom tier of nations.
But in National Happiness Index surveys that simply asks how people feel, we sometimes get No. 1 or No. 2 place. The lowest appears to be No. 12, but in that survey materialist happiness indicators were included.
In this third to the last day of 2011, when there’s an alarm that more Ondoy- and Sendong-volume rainfall is falling all over our archipelago, and the world economy is sure to be less robust than before so that our business with the rich of the world might not be as good as in previous years, we should thank God that the majority of our people are still full of hope. May we all also be full of grace.
And may our country be filled with more blessings than it has ever had before.
The SWS news release announcing these results leads with the buoyant words: “Despite the
turbulence that characterized 2011, 95% of Filipinos still face the coming year with hope rather than with fear.”
Once more we are proving to be children of Hope and Happiness. Adherents of Jesus Christ’s frequent call to his disciples: “Do not be afraid.” Do not be people shaken with fear, made anxious by doubt.
Hope has a great psychic value. It also has an economic and material value. It makes workers, executives, athletes and math-driven gamblers work harder and achieve more than those who are fearful, anxious and unsure of themselves.
This high optimism, says SWS, “matches the all-time high hope level registered in 2002. It is also two points higher than the previous survey.”
The SWS first did this hope-versus-fear poll in December 2000. Hope for the coming year has thereafter been at high levels since then.
This survey was conducted on December 3 to 7, 2011, using face-to-face interviews of 1,200 adults in Metro Manila, the Balance of Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao.
SWS says: “Interestingly, hope is widespread, with record-highs in Metro Manila and Mindanao. It stayed at record-high 96 percent in Metro Manila. In Mindanao, hope increased by five points to 94 percent. This record-high was first reached in 2002.”
The hope level hardly changed in the Visayas, from a record-high 97 percent in 2010 to 96 percent in 2011, and in Balance Luzon, from 94 percent to 95 percent.”
This sentiment can also be seen in all socio-economic classes. The very poor class E registered a new record-high of 93 percent from 89 percent last year.
“New Year hope also stayed at record-high 97 percent among the middle to upper classes ABC.
“It hardly changed among the masa class D, from 95 percent to 96 percent.”
Hope in Christian theology
Hope is not only a positive force for productivity among workers, executives, athletes and gamblers.
Hope is one of the three theological virtues of Christianity. The theological virtues are faith, hope and charity. These virtues are supernaturally infused by God into the soul of the faithful to make him or her capable of acting the way His children should and thus merit eternal life.
Says the Catechism: Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.
God has placed in the human heart the aspiration to happiness. The virtue of hope responds to that aspiration to happiness. It takes up the hopes that inspire men’s activities (including the hope we hold in the turbulent last days of 2011 that there will be a better life in 2012). This virtue of hope helps keep the faithful person aspire to be pure because his most important objective is to dwell in the everlasting happiness of being with God. It keeps man from being defeated by discouragement. It sustains him during times of abandonment. It opens up his heart to the happiness of looking forward to the eternal beatitude.
Hope buoys a man up from the vice of selfishness and leads him to acts of charity (love of God and doing what will please Him and others) from which happiness flows.
This hope that Filipinos always have must come from their infused virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity. For only a person who absolutely believes in God’s presence, has no doubt whatsoever that God’s providence will always preserve him and those he loves. And he would then have that kind of hope that SWS surveys have found year in and year out for 11 years.
For this kind of hope to be in the heart and mind of 95 percent of the Filipinos in the SWS national sample of respondents can only mean that by and large our people will never be defeated by calamities, bad governance, massive poverty and whatever challenges might be up ahead of us.
It means that given the right kind of leadership, we Filipinos will really become a great and Godly nation of achievers. People who will do their best and act with charity (love) to each other because that is the way to act out of love for God while we are in this world.
Tops in human happiness index
And this too is the underlying reason we are always somewhere at or near the top in the Human Happiness Index.
Even in the modified surveys and research to gauge national happiness — modified by the United Nations to include mathematically measurable levels of development — we fare rather well. In the UN statistical research of humankind’s development level and happiness in which wealth, education and other materialist factors used in gauging the GDP were included, we Filipinos were found to be in the medium-developed nations, not at the bottom tier of nations.
But in National Happiness Index surveys that simply asks how people feel, we sometimes get No. 1 or No. 2 place. The lowest appears to be No. 12, but in that survey materialist happiness indicators were included.
In this third to the last day of 2011, when there’s an alarm that more Ondoy- and Sendong-volume rainfall is falling all over our archipelago, and the world economy is sure to be less robust than before so that our business with the rich of the world might not be as good as in previous years, we should thank God that the majority of our people are still full of hope. May we all also be full of grace.
And may our country be filled with more blessings than it has ever had before.
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