“Ang hirap mong dalhin, Pilipinas.” (Philippines, you’re such a heavy burden to carry.)
That’s what I remember Lea Salonga saying as she ventilated her feelings of frustration about what’s wrong with our people. And immediately she got bashed on social media by people who were too quick to misunderstand her or predisposed to silence anyone who dares to voice any criticism about the current state of affairs. Which actually proved her point.
Deep in my heart, I could empathize with her buntong hininga (sigh) her ulos ng damdamin (emotional effusion). Sometimes in my low moments, I too begin to ask the question, what’s the point of having a country like the Philippines.
As a nation, we’re so divided by hatred and acrimonious bickerings. It’s as if the pulse of our nation is coming from many differing heartbeats. We never seem to agree on anything.
The wrong leaders keep beguiling us and we keep electing them. The same names keep cropping up to plunder the nation’s wealth.
Nakakapagod kang dalhin.(So tiresome to carry.)
In his small book entitled 12 Wonderful Things about the Filipino and Our Motherland, Filipino lawyer, poet, businessman, civil society leader, and NGO leader Alex Lacson laments the fact that there’s so much negativity about the Filipino and our country, asking why do we lack faith in the Filipino, in ourselves as a people? Why do we look down on our fellow Filipinos? Why do we have difficulty trusting one another?
We are a nation that is drifting because we don’t have an anchor, an ideological mooring. We don’t have a set of revelations, a collective set of truths that we can all agree on, hold on and rally around.
“Puso, Pilipinas” is a battle cry we are fond of using as a way to galvanize us in sports events. But the emotion dissipates as soon as the athletes we are rooting for fail to deliver. Sure we have patriotic slogans like the Filipino is worth dying for or living for but what are we supposed to die for? We are not even proud of our identity because we don’t have one. Even our constitution is a copy of other constitutions.
“Country above all” is another empty platitude we love to brandish to project a sense of patriotism. But why? What does this country stand for? What noble vision do our people aspire for?
“Inang bayan” we reverently say but in reality we put more importance on personalities, willing to bash other Filipinos for them, even willing to hate our families for them. Even so-called intellectuals or who should know better don’t think twice about serving under the banner of their chosen personalities.
Most of us were probably absent during our classes in history and Philippine constitution. If not, we were sleeping. And today, we wake up to find out that we have slept away our rights as citizens. We allowed the law to be weaponized and the noble spirit of the law has been distorted and manipulated and turned around to strike down our individual rights one by one.
Probably because we didn’t know any better. We never learned to value and fight for our democratic ideals because probably we never appreciated, understood them or internalized them.
Meron ka bang saysay, Pilipinas? May kapupuntahan ka ba? Saan ka ba talaga patutungo? (What is the significance of all these, Philippines?) What are our set of common beliefs that will enable us to say that we are worth dying for?
It is time to take stock of ourselves. We need an inspiring but unsparing examination of our ideals. If we have them, what are these?
We need to begin looking for these on which to build on. We need to coalesce around some enduring ideas that we can aspire for or move towards.
Why did we want to be independent in the first place? What is our main revelation, our credo, the mystery of our national faith? Can the Kartilya be our national ideology, our anchor, our unifying vision? Can Rizal’s writings provide us this integrating idea?
Or have we just been running on empty for the past 120 plus years? Is it all just puso? Really? Walang malalim na kaisipan (No depth or substance?)
Do we have an organically developed ideology comparative to “e pluribus unum” of America or “liberte, fraternite, egalite,” of France or pancasila of Indonesia?
For a country on the verge of a turning point in an increasingly divisive era, we need something to hold us together in spite of our differences. What is a Filipino? What do Filipinos believe? Why do we act as we do? What ideals do we have to guide our national destiny?
Regardless of our politics we need to revisit or revalue our country’s high-minded heritage. What are the ideals quintessentially Filipino that animate us, galvanize us, unify us?
In college, we were required to write a paper on a play by Luigi Pirandello entitled “Six Characters in Search of an author.” It was a play in the absurdist genre and revolved around six “characters” claiming that they are the incomplete creations of an author who couldn’t finish the work for which they were conceived. It is supposed to be performed on an empty stage.
That’s how I view the Philippines right now. We are an unfinished nation. The building of our national character is incomplete, still in progress, revealing our people’s fluid realities and identity confusion. Are we really just moving along, improvising and inventing things as we move along?
We need to turn to common beliefs that will provide a unifying focus for our thoughts and our lives, the patrimony of all Filipinos. We cannot be bound together by just emotion. But by things that transcend emotion, by common principles, and ideals that define our true national character.
What are these? I alone do not have the answers. The definition of our national character cannot just be invented or copied or picked from the shelf. It must be developed one citizen at a time. Right now we can only feel hopeful like the ever optimistic Alex Lacson who in his little book writes: “I believe that God has a beautiful story for us as a people…that we need the guidance and the wisdom of the Almighty to soften our hearts and egos so we would learn to see each other as brethren, and so we would learn to work with each other as one family.”