The courage to be honest
When you enter my apartment, there are closets on the left side. In those closets I have crammed trash for sorting out. On weekends when I am alone in the house I sort out the clutter. At the end of the day I am covered with the dust of the years.
Last weekend, while I was doing this, my cell phone rang. It was an old acquaintance asking if I might consent to be interviewed on TV for an ancestor’s 150th birthday. Oh no, I thought, I don’t want to do TV anymore. I am old and tired and surely there are other relatives you can talk to. But, he said, we have found out new things and I thought we might be able to discuss it so people will see him as a regular person.
In the end I agreed and we had a rather animated interview. Of course, as of this writing, I don’t know how it will come out. It has to be edited. Other people need to be featured. It’s supposed to be finished by month’s end on GMA 7, but the things we talked about, especially about Filipino culture, stuck and keep replaying in my mind. What’s wrong with our culture? Finally, I have an answer. I don’t think we have found the courage to tell the truth, to be honest.
Before the Spanish stumbled upon us we were not a country. We were a bunch of Malayan kingdoms who were neighbors. We had a lifestyle. We had some kind of animist religion and we were polygamous. We were totally human.
The Spanish came upon us and decided to call our batch of islands Las Islas Felipinas, in English (King) Felipe’s Islands. They colonized with the cross, taught us to change our lifestyles, taught our women to be subservient to men, taught us to trade in our animist religious statues for their religious statues. Did we really learn?
I look, I step back, I study. My opinion? We haven’t learned. We did not change our lifestyle. We just chose not to talk about it. For generations we have had families — husbands and wives who have remained together until one of them died, but also mistresses with children. From one man the children were divided into legitimate and illegitimate. I have always wondered: Why were the children penalized? They had nothing to do with their births. They were born because of something their parents did. Why were they called illegitimate? Why did they have to be differentiated from the children of the wife? Surely the philandering husband and the other woman were to blame for the baby’s birth. Why penalize the child?
Lawyers say it has something to do with property, it’s an old law. I think it’s time to have it changed. Time passes and brings its own blessings. Vision broadens. Understanding grows. Things must change. We should start discussing our lifestyles openly. What is the joy of family secrets? They eventually get unveiled — in one or a hundred years, they eventually get unveiled.
But we don’t have the courage to say what we suspect or know to have happened. Every family has illegitimate relatives whom we love dearly. But we try not to look. If asked, we shrug our shoulders or arch our eyebrows. We never say anything. We are taught not to say anything. We are taught to be ashamed of the things that are slightly askew in our lives. We are taught to be hiya, shamed, and shame has gotten us exactly nowhere.
What is the value of shame? I ask. Shame has no value. The truth, that’s what has value. If we told the truth, if we were honest at all times, we would have a better society with less corruption. But it is hard to tell the truth and face the music if from childhood you’ve been told to sshhh! So we don’t have a country full of courageous brave men and women. We have a country full of silly, simpering people who simply refuse to be honest.
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