I don't know if you will publish this in your essay or
tell-tale section but this article is one helluva
eye-opener. No plagiarism here -- author is clearly
identified... Kini para sa mga maayo natong laki nga
Butuanon o Caragan === the punchline of this
observation that caught my eye is this: "A people
without a sense of history is a people doomed to be
unaware of their own identity. .......... Without a
sense of who you are how can you possibly take any
pride in who you are?"
Samtang ang tawo mosiyagit, mokatawa ug makiglantugi,
kana timailhan nga siya wala pa kawad-i sa paglaum...
God bless us all!!!!
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The unedited article below was written below by an
American friend, Barth Suretsky. This will still be
edited but you will get the gist. I find his
observations interesting. I hope this will make an
impact on the Filipinos who read this article as I
greately lament the worsening situation of our
country.
My decision to move to Manila was not a precipitous
one. I used to work in New York as an outside agent
for PAL, and have been coming to the Philippines since
August, 1982. I was so impressed with the country,
and
with the interesting people I met, some of which have
become very close friends to this day, that I asked
for and was granted a year's sabbatical from my
teaching job in order to live in the Philippines. I
arrived here on August 21, 1983, several hours after
Ninoy Aquino was shot, and remained here until June of
1984. During that year I visited many parts of the
country, from as far north as Loag to as far south as
Zamboanga, and including Palawan. I became deeply
immersed in the history and culture of the
archipelago, and an avid collector of tribal
antiquities from both northern Luzon, and Mindanao.
In subsequent years I visited the Philippines in 1985,
1987, and 1991, before deciding to move here
permanently in 1998. I love this country, but not
uncritically, and that is the purpose of this article.
First, however, I will say that I would not consider
living anywhere else in Asia, no matter how attractive
certain aspects of other neighboring countries may be.
To begin with, and this is most important, with all
its faults, the Philippines is still a democracy, more
so than any other nation in Southeast Asia. Despite
gross corruption, the legal system generally works,
and if ever confronted with having to employ it, I
would feel much more safe
trusting the courts here than in any other place in
the surrounding area. The press here is
unquestionably the most unfettered and freewheeling in
Asia, and I do not believe that is hyperbole in any
way! And if any one thing can be used as a yardstick
to measure the extent of the democratic process in any
given country in the world, it is the extent to which
the press is free.
But the Philippines is a flawed democracy
nevertheless, and the flaws are deeply rooted in the
Philippine psyche. I will elaborate... The basic
problem seems to me, after many years of observation,
to be a national inferiority complex, a disturbing
lack of pride in being Filipino. Toward the end of
April I spent eight days in Vietnam, visiting Hanoi,
Hue, and Ho Chi Minh City. I am certainly no expert
on Vietnam, but what I saw could not be denied: I saw
a country ravaged as no other country has been in this
century by thirty years of continuous and incredibly
barbaric warfare.
When the Vietnam War ended in April, 1975, the country
was totally devastated. Yet in the past twenty-five
years the nation has healed and rebuilt itself almost
miraculously! The countryside has been replanted and
reforested. Hanoi and HCMC have been beautifully
restored. The opera house in Hanoi is a splended
restoration of the original, modeled after the
Opera in Paris, and the gorgeous Second Empire
theater, on the main square of HCMC is as it was when
built by the French a century ago. The streets
are tree-lined, clean, and conducive for strolling.
Cafes in the French style proliferate on the wide
boulevards of HCMC. I am not praising the
government of Vietnam, which still has a long way to
travel on the road to democracy, but I do praise, and
praise unstintingly, the pride of the Vietnamese
people. It is due to this pride in being Vietnamese
that has enabled its citizenry to undertake the
miracle of restoration that I have described above.
When I returned to Manila I became so depressed that I
was actually physically ill for days thereafter. Why?
Well, let's go back to a period when the Philippines
resembled the Vietnam of 1975. It was 1945, the end
of World War II, and Manila, as well as many other
cities, lay in ruins. (As a matter of fact, it may
not be generally known, but Manila was the second most
destroyed city in the entire war; only Warsaw was more
demolished!) But to compare Manila in 1970,
twenty-five years after the end of the war, with HCMC,
twenty-five years after the end of its war, is a sad
exercise indeed. Far from restoring the city to its
former glory, by 1970 Manila was well on its way to
being the most tawdry city in Southeast Asia. And
since that time the situation has deteriorated
alarmingly. We have a city full of street people,
beggars, and squatters. We have a city that floods
sections whenever there is a rainstorm, and that loses
electricity with every clap of thunder. We have a
city full of potholes, and on these unrepaired roads
we have a traffic situation second to none in the
world for sheer unmanageability. We have rude
drivers, taxis that routinely refuse to take
passengers because of "many trappic!" The roads are
also cursed with pollution-spewing buses in
disreputable states of repair, and that ultimate
anachronism, the jeepney! We have an educational
system that allows children to attend schools without
desks or books to accomodate them. Teachers, even
college professors, are paid salaries so disgracefully
low that it's a wonder that anyone would want to go
into the teaching profession in the first place. We
have a war in Mindanao that nobody seems to have a
clue how to settle. The only policy to deal with the
war seems to be to react to what happens daily, with
no long range plan whatever. I could go on and on,
but it is an endeavor so filled with futility that it
hurts me to go on. It hurts me because, in spite of
everything, I love the Philippines.
Maybe it will sound simplistic, but to go back to what
I said above, it is my unshakable belief that the
fundamental thing wrong with this country is
a lack of pride in being Filipino. A friend once
remarked to me, laconically: "All Filipinos want to be
something else. The poor ones want to be American,
and the rich ones all want to be Spaniards. Nobody
wants to be Filipino." That statement woulkd appear
to be a rather simplistic one, and perhaps it is.
However, I know one Filipino who refuses to enter
a theater until the national anthem has stopped being
played because he doesn't want to honor his own
country, and I know another one who thinks that
history stopped dead in 1898 when the Spaniards
departed! While it is certainly true that these
represent extreme examples of national denial,
the truth is not a pretty picture. Filipinos tend to
worship, almost slavishly, everything foreign. If it
comes from Italy or France it has to be better than
anything made here. If the idea is American or German
it has to be superior to anything that Filipinos can
think up for themselves. Foreigners are looked up to
and idolized. Foreigners can go anywhere without
question. In my own poersonal experience I remember
attending recently an affair at a major museum here. I
had forgotten to bring my invitation. But while
Filipinos entering the museum were checked for
invitations, I was simply waived through. This sort
of thing happens so often here that it just accepted
routine. All of these things, the illogical respect
given to foreigners simply because they are not
Filipinos, the distrust and even disrespect shown to
any homegrown merchandise, the neglect of anything
Philippine, the rudeness of taxi drivers, the
ill-manners shown by many Filipinos are all
symptomatic of a lack of self-love, of respect for and
love of the country in which they were born, and worst
of all, a static mind-set in regard to finding ways to
improve the situation. Most Filipinos, when
confronted with evidence of governmental corruption,
political chicanery, or gross exploitation on the part
of the business community, simply shrug their
shoulders, mutter "bahala na," and let it go at that.
It is an oversimplification to say this, but it is not
without a grain of truth to say that Filipinos feel
downtrodden because they allow themselves to feel
downtrodden. No pride.
One of the most egregious examples of this lack of
pride, this uncaring attitude to their own past or
past culture, is the wretched state of surviving
architectural landmarks in Manila and elsewhere.
During the American period many beautiful and imposing
buildings were built, in what we now call the "art
deco" style (although, incidentally, that was not a
contemporary term; it was coined only in the 1960s).
These were beautiful edifices, mostly erected during,
or just before, the Commonwealth period. Three, which
are still standing, are the Jai Alai Building, the
Metropolitan Theater, and the Rizal Stadium.
Fortunately, due to the truly noble efforts of my
friend John Silva, the Jai Alai Building will now be
saved. But unless something is done to the most
beautiful and original of these three masterpieces of
pre-war Philippine architecture, the Metropolitan
Theater, it will disintegrate. The Rizal Stadium is
in
equally wretched shape. When the wreckers ball
destroyed Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel in
Tokyo, and New York City's most magnificent
building, Pennsylvania Station, both in 1963, Ada
Louise Huxtable, then the architectural critic of The
New York Times, wrote: "A disposable culture
loses the right to call itself a civilization at all!"
Hoow right she was! (Fortunately, the destruction of
Pennsylvania Station proved to be the
sacrificial catalyst that resulted in the creation of
New York's Landmark Commission. Would that such a
commission be created for Manila...)
Are there historical reasons for this lack of national
pride? We can say that until the arrival of the
Spaniards there was no sense of a unified archipelago
constituted as one country. True. We can also say
that the high cultures of other nations in the region
seemed, unfortunately, to have bypassed the
Philippines; there are no Angkors, no Ayuttayas, no
Borobudurs. True. Centuries of contact with the
"high cultures" of the Khmers and the Chinese had,
except for the proliferation of Sung dynasty pottery
found throughout the archipelago, no noticeable
effect. True. But all that aside, what was here? To
begin with, the ancient rice terraces, now threatened
with disintegration, incidentally, was an incredible
feat of engineering for so-called "primitive" people.
As a matter of fact, when I first saw them in 1984, I
was almost as awe-stricken as I was when I first
laid eyes on the astonishing Inca city of Machu
Picchu, high in the Peruvian Andes. The degree of
artistry exhibited by the various tribes of the
cordillera of Luzon is testimony to a remarkable
culture, second to none in the Southeast Asian region.
As for Mindanao, at the other end of the archipelago,
an equally high degree of artistry has been manifest
for centuries in woodcarving, weaving and metalwork.
However, the most shocking aspect of this lack of
national pride, even identity, endemic in the average
Filipino, is the appalling ignorance of the history of
the archipelago since unified by Spain and named
Filipinas. The remarkable stories concerning the
Galleon de Manila, the courageous repulsion of Dutch
and British invaders from the 16th through the 18th
centuries, even the origins of the independence
movement of the late 19th century, are hardly known by
the average Filipino in any meaningful way. And
thanks to fifty years of American brainwashing, it is
few and far between the number of Filipinos who really
know - or even care - about the duplicity employed by
the Americans and Spaniards to sell out and make
meaningless the very independant state that Aguinaldo
delared on June 12, 1898. A people without a sense of
history is a people doomed to be unaware of their own
identity. It is sad to say, but true, that the vast
majority of Filipinos fall into this lamentable
category. Without a sense of who you are how can you
possibly take any pride in who you are?
These are not oversimplifications. On the contrary,
these are the root problems of the Philippine
inferiority complex referred to above. Until the
Filipino takes pride in being Filipino these ills of
the soul will never be cured. If what I have written
here can help, even in the smallest way, to make the
Filipino aware of just who he is, who he was, and who
he can be, I will be one happy expat indeed!
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