Having been invaded by a neighboring country, Ukrainians are now being called by destiny to stand up and fight for their motherland.
On our TV and digital screens, we watch civilians volunteering to fight. After bidding farewell to their families at the borders, the menfolk go back to defend their respective cities. Women too are taking up arms and are training to fight. Ukrainians from all over the world, even celebrities abroad, are returning to their homeland, vowing to give up their lives to defend it.
There is this touching scene of a fearless and defiant Ukrainian woman, insisting on giving a handful of sunflower seeds to a Russian soldier while telling him to return to where he came from, otherwise he would just die in Ukraine with those seeds in his pocket. The sunflower is a symbol of her love for the land of her birth.
Every day, I can only watch with sadness and admiration for the suffering people of Ukraine who are now giving us a live lesson on what patriotism really means.
In grade school, every school child is given lessons on patriotism and love of country. But all those dictums and precepts we memorized about love of country are nothing until we are subjected to a term of trial similar to what the Ukrainians are now going through. They are living the lesson on the point of death.
I would do the same. When one’s country is being invaded by a transgressor, it is one’s duty to fight for it. Still, I dread the day when we would be facing this test.
This is why this is a good time as any for all of us to brush up our school books and read the writings of our heroes, this time with more feeling. There is a forgotten essay of Jose Rizal entitled “El Amor Patrio” (Love of Country) written in 1882 in which he declares that love of country “of all loves…is the greatest, the most heroic…”
This sentiment is echoed in Ka Andres Bonifacio’s poem “Pag-ibig sa Tinubuang Lupa” (Love for One’s Homeland):
Aling pag-ibig pa ang hihigit kaya
sa pagkadalisay at pagkadakila
gaya ng pag-ibig sa tinubuang lupa?
Alin pag-ibig pa? Wala na nga, wala.
(What purity and greatness can surpass love of country? None.)
No invading arms can be equal to the might of a sense of right and love for the motherland. Would be conquerors should take heed.
Vladimir Putin may conquer the land of the Ukrainians but he won’t be able to hold it forever. When people have invested so much in a land there’s no way you can take it away from them. Why are members of ethnic tribes willing to die? Because their hearts have roots in their land. Their ancestors and forefathers are buried there.
How I wish that we had the collective fervor of the Ukrainians when the boats of the Chinese coast guards shooed away our fishermen from our own fishing grounds and even rammed one of our local boats in an arrogant show of force. The lines of Bonifacio should ring in our minds like a rebuke: “Nasaan ang dangal…nasaan ang dugong dapat na ibuhos? Bayan ay inaapi, bakit di kumikilos?“(Where is the sense of national dignity, the blood that ought to be spilled? Our nation is being trampled upon, why are we not outraged to action?)
There was a time when we summoned our collective fury to fight invaders and displayed true love of country by making the supreme sacrifice. That was in World War II when our homeland was drenched by the blood of our gallant countrymen and women.
Whenever I come home from trips abroad, I make it a point to look outside the plane’s window. As the plane circles to land at Naia, I see a landscape that is dotted with green and then ugly rusty roofs, so third world looking. But then I feel something tugging at my heart. Ugly and dirty it may be but it’s my home, my country, my land of my birth. There’s no place like one’s tinubuang lupa.
But I am afraid, our sense of patriotism has been thinly instilled in us. Our sense of pride as Filipinos seems to be very shallow and fickle. We only feel it when one of our athletes become champions or an elegant Filipino woman wins an international beauty title.
Meanwhile, foreigners don’t need to invade us militarily. We have been allowing foreign investors to own our lands, do business without paying proper taxes, dig our mountains for sand to build islands in the middle of the sea, pollute our rivers and destroy our forests for minerals. Our minerals. One foreign-owned telecommunications network has even been able to set up towers right inside our military camps. There may be truth to one observation that we are now a virtual province of another country.
Do we really love this land of ours? Will there be a Zelenskyy among our leaders to stand up against the invaders? Will Filipino immigrants and their foreign-born children pack up and come home to fight here for our homeland?
It pains me to see Filipinos proclaiming “Proud to be American” on social media, showing their newly acquired certificate of American citizenship.
I feel insulted witnessing a young Filipino parent loudly talking to her toddler son in English at one moment and then in the next moment giving her order in Pilipino to the girl at the fast food counter. This is probably a woman who as a girl recited countless times the lines: “Iniibig ko ang Pilipinas, aking lupang sinilangan, ito ang tahanan ng aking lahi” (I love the Philippines, my land of birth, home of my race.)
And there are many more other dismaying incidents that make me wonder sometimes if we need an external military invasion to unite us, to provoke and awaken our professed love of country.
We need to reconsider our school curricula to add more lessons and more powerful ways to deepen our sense of patriotism and love of our motherland. Every Filipino child born in this land should appreciate and love his country more than anyone else.
Should the time come, may future generations of Filipinos live up to Rizal’s words: “I offer my life gladly… Let those who deny us patriotism see that we know how to die for our duty and convictions…What does it matter to die, if one dies for what one loves, for the Native Land?”