It's a time for guessing.

Myles Horton, a close friend of Martin Luther King, once sold the secret of a good social action group is its ability to guess what will be the next moss social movement and prepare for it. That way the group will have a position within the movement and not be left behind.

By social movement Horton meant events like the labor movement in the United States in the 1930s and the civil rights movement thirty years later. In the Philippines the early 1970s would be such a social movement, when thousands of people and groups suddenly demanded basic reforms in government. The coalition that grew after the assassination of Benigno Aquino from 1983 to 1986 would be another.

Movements arise without much warning, last three to ten years and fade. They are the times for feasting, organizationally speaking. Between them are the lean years when not much hap­pens and every step forward is tremendously difficult. By all accounts we're in the middle of such hard times now.

Movements differ in goals, class of actors and levels of success. The labor movement was white, proletarian, secular. The civil rights move­ment was black, rural, heavily middle class and religious. The 1970s movement here was largely radical and leftist. That of 1983 was middle class and reformist.

Another movement is surely coming. The trouble is we don't know what it will be. We don't know, but we can try to guess. But before guessing it¡¯s well to remember we shouldn't be too hard on ourselves for not achieving more in the lean years, those years between move­ments when the forces of change are barely alive. The fault is in our stars, not in ourselves....

If we expect our work to grow steadily at oll times, we will be disappointed. If we insist on moving at full speed in dry, non-movement periods we'll burn ourselves out, or strip our gears as an activist said.

Can we guess what will be the next move­ment? Will it be a movement of workers, peasants, urban poor, minorities, middle class people, right wing people? Will it be totally secular or partly religious, leftist or centrist? if we knew, we could get ready.

Here for purposes of discussion is one pos­sibility. Picture a movement that is very explicitly religious. In part this will be a reaction to what is seen as a lack of moral principals in the present ideological and secular organizing groups. The new movement may resemble the pre-Martial Law Federation of Free Farmers.

The old FFF had an ideology based on the social encyclicals; it had priests as chaplains and it gained wide Church support. It's possible the new movement will unite Catholics and Fundamentalists. It may recall the Sakdalista groups of the post. it will have a fairly radical social message though its theology will be con­servative.

A perceived absence of moral values in the past and a people's search for simple solutions in hard times can favor the growth of such a movement. However simple solutions can make the new movement dogmatic, intolerant, im­patient and maybe even violent when chan­ges do not come as expected.

What do you think? What will be the future?