The Epitome of a Good Filipino

“Every good citizen adds to the strength of a nation.” — Gordon B. Hinckley

It is another new year, another opportunity to close the book on the mistakes we know we committed and open blank pages that we can fill up with the good things we do for ourselves, our families and our communities. That will, however, mean that we focus less on the sins of everybody as our primary concern and look more to our individual obligations as good human beings and productive citizens of the republic.

That is a serious challenge – to look at ourselves, our faults, and our challenges to better ourselves. It is a challenge that is easier set aside and just resort to criticizing others. The noise out there, the hate and accusations hurl at each other this year, will determine how well we have lived up to the challenge.

Alex Lacson is one Filipino who has long stepped up to this challenge. In 2005 when, after going through a personal dilemma, decided to use the incredible talent God gave him — writing — and authored a small book entitled, 12 Little Things Every Filipino Can Do To Help Our Country, which to his pleasant surprise, became an instant national bestseller. It made him — and countless other citizens who have thought of giving up their motherland to greener pastures — realize that there are actually many Filipinos who love their country and want to do something to help it become developed and prosperous.

Since then, Alex has written several more books — 12 Wonderful Things about the Filipino and Our Motherland, Five Hundred Years Without Love, and I Am Filipino, among others — that promoted love for our country and good citizenship.

A graduate of the University of the Philippines College of Law in 1996, he later took a short summer program at Harvard Law School in Harvard University, Massachusetts, USA. In 2007, he completed a leadership course and training based on Christian principles at the Haggai Institute in Singapore.

Alex currently serves as a board member in the Advisory Boards of Alay Buhay Foundation, the Philippine Army and the Department of National Defense; he is also the former chairman of Civil Service Commission’s Multi-Sector Advisory Council; and served as CEO of ISA (Institute of Solidarity Asia), a public governance institute that runs good governance & development programs with several LGUs and national agencies like the AFP, PNP, Department of National Defense, Board of Investments, among others. An active volunteer of many noteworthy causes, Alex was also a former legal counsel of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in the Philippines; a former columnist of the BusinessWorld Newspaper; a co-founder and former president of the Pilipino Movement for Transformational Leadership (PTML), a coalition of faith-based organizations from the Catholic, Evangelical and Protestant communities whose primary objective is to help in electing genuine servant leaders for national and local positions through the GabayKristo voter’s program.

Last September 2021, Alex originally announced that he would run for Vice-President in the upcoming 2022 elections under the Kapatiran Party, but later withdrew his bid to run for Senator under the ticket of presidential aspirant Vice-President Leni Robredo. He shared Robredo’s goals of economic reforms by empowering people at the society’s grassroots, such as farmers and fisherfolk and others in the agricultural sector and expressed his support in complementing the Vice-President’s flagship anti-poverty program, Angat Buhay.

With good citizens like Alex at the helm of our government’s highest levels, I am confident that an entire generation will be living in the new kind of world he and countless other idealists like him will mold. His spirited cause of good citizenship and his unwavering belief in the Filipinos’ sense of nationhood will continue to spark a chronic, yearning noise, which could only be silenced by a more blaring clamor of a new generation of young leaders who are willing to take the same enormous risks and triumph at last — all in the name of a better Philippines.