BE PROUD TO BE A FILIPINO
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 greatly lament the
worsening situation of our country.
- Frank Woolf
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 Laoag 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 would
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 personal 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!" How 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 Song 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 independent state that Aguinaldo declared
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 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!
Frank Woolf
Vice President for Development
I-Quest Corporation
6th Floor, World Center
330 Sen Gil Puyat Avenue
Makati City 1200, Philippines
Creators of WorldRoom
Tel: (632) 867 8460
Fax: (632) 867 8077
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