Why we’re losers II / The debate rages

I never imagined I would hit a deep vein and open a big wound in the national psyche when I wrote the column titled "Why we’re losers" two weeks ago. The reaction from all over has been fast and sometimes furious, often sober yes, and at times ridiculous. If I had written that column five or ten years ago, when the Philippines still looked perched on a sturdy hill, very few would have minded, really. But now that the republic is besieged on all fronts by crisis in battalia, and terror is a huge shadow falling upon all, many have taken to emotional arms. Fine. We needed fear to trigger off this agonizing reappraisal.

I think the nation is getting scared. Particularly the middle class, the educated sectors. Largely it is this columnist who scares them. They say I always bear bad and depressing tidings. And yet if I am guilty of anything, it’s telling or communicating the truth. I judge that we are losers on one basic and unalterable fact alone. That our leadership, or if you wish our culture, has pastured us over the generations to an appalling state of poverty, oppression and social misery. It is a wretched baggage 80 million Filipinos do not deserve. There are those who counter that Filipinos are happy in their misery because more than any other nation or nationality, they have the spiritual fortitude to overcome physical agony.

This is to argue the ugly monster of poverty must persevere because it brings out the best in the Filipino. This, to me, is rubbish. A recipe for national suicide.

Poverty is our biggest curse. If we do not subjugate it in the near future, the nation faces bloody upheaval. This will be the resurgence of a revolution that never really succeeded against Spain and America. Equally the resurgence of two People Power "revolutions" that tore off the pants of two utterly disreputable presidents but failed to tear off the ligaments of a system that was and remains rotten to the core. Ninoy Aquino was imprisoned and died because he could not stomach the system. And so did our heroes of yore – Jose Rizal, Andres Bonifacio, Emilio Aguinaldo, Apolinario Mabini, Gregorio del Pilar, Graciano Lopez-Jaena et al.

Did they die in vain? Shouldn’t they have simply lapsed into thankful prayer because, after all, suffering, oppression, injustice comprised the blessed potion that brought forth spiritual solace? This is the main argument of my detractors and I find it absolutely preposterous. Our historic landscape is streaked by the blood of our revolutionary forbears, not the pious and perfumed musings of some of our critics and a warmed-over and stale Pax Christi that pledges the poor bountiful rewards in heaven. Wasn’t blood the legacy bequeathed to us by Fathers Gomez, Burgos and Zamora? And didn’t this blood pave the way for revolution?

Since we are still on the subject of why we Filipinos are losers, let’s stir it up some more.

Many Filipinos wonder or are beginning to believe our country is getting more and more effeminate. Yes, effeminate. That explains the lack of virility of our political system, our mostly male politicians dressed up like peacocks and behaving accordingly. They do not strike out for reforms. They do not storm the barricades and punish the crooks and criminals. They do not blaze paths to political renewal. In street demonstrations, the women more than the men display more conviction and courage. That explains, too, another astonishing phenomenon. This is the proliferation of gays or homosexuals in almost all sectors of our society. They are particularly conspicuous in broadcast media, in films and entertainment, fashion and lifestyle. Even politics. And a great many of them occupy executive or managerial positions. I have not seen this phenomenon in other countries. So much so, it is argued, that gays have become a model for success in our society. Only twenty years ago gayness was ridiculed and proscribed. Isn’t this effeminization? It is often asked.

There is another factor to consider as to why Filipinos have lapsed into a spiritual cocoon. Unlike the Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Singaporeans, Malays, Thais, the refrain goes that Filipinos are not builders, entrepreneurs or creators. Theirs is the spinning of spiritual castles bounded largely by religious faith, spiritual destiny, and almost abject surrender to Fate… The world to conquer is not the physical world – so what if we are poor and destitute? – but the winged world of the divinities. Another thing. Filipinos believe in the power or perhaps supremacy of the female. The cult of mariolatry, it is argued, conditions him to pray to a woman, the Virgin Mary. The cult of pure innocence in a world of sin conditions him to invoke the image of the Santo Niño, the Child Jesus. The cult of suffering, of pain, of agony, conditions him to swarm around the bleeding, staggering, suffering figure of the Black Nazarene.

All in all, these are the perceived constraints on the Filipino. And they are formidable constraints in a world struggling mightily to smash the chains of millennial poverty. If this indeed is our destiny – to fall ecstatically on the wayside beside the Black Nazarene – then for gosshakes let’s dump the preamble of our constitution. It reads that we are ordained to "promote the common good, conserve and develop our patrimony and secure to ourselves and our posterity the blessings of independence and democracy under the rule of law and a regime of truth, justice, freedom, love, equality and peace."

Them’s big words. And our task is to fight to make them come true.

Now to our mail.

First off – and she did not exactly write to me – is Gilda Cordero Fernando, prominent woman of letters who wrote a front-page article for the Philippine Daily Inquirer in rebuttal to my column. It was not what I wrote, she argued back, but what I missed or overlooked. And for her, what was absent was the capacity of the Filipino "to be a superbeing." The Pinoy, she said, is a "crisis person" who " can muster all the courage in his being and rise beyond the physical." Ah, Ms. Fernando, you remind me of the priest who told me starving Filipinos and hungry babies dying in the arms of their mothers were simply suffering physical pain. But they were actually happy, he said, because of the anticipation they would go to heaven. I found that absolutely yuck. A cop-out on the part of some religious brethren who failed to do anything to relieve grinding poverty in the Philippines.

The Filipino has a "divine assignment", Ms. Fernando continues, and so everything is provided for. Now listen to this: "No shortage of love in the Filipino family, the more mouths to feed, the more love one has in return." Ah love, what crmes are committed in thy name! And the Pinay as the world’s atsay? She imbues in her foreign employers "the Filipino values of cleanliness, obedience, love of God and family and connectedness to everyone." And so, Ms. Fernando concludes, "the Filipino woman is assigned to restore order in the universe just as she always is in her own homeland." Another lulu: "A divine energy has pushed the Pinay to rise above her limitations and be a mother to the world." Begorra, Ma’m, that "mother to the world" thingamajig really takes the cake. Great gods and the marching Tibetans!

Tony Montemayor, son of the late and lamented Jeremias Montemayor, labor leader par excellence, says "the most tragic thing of all is how we have not used our very own Christianity to solve our country’s problems." He mentions the papal encyclicals on labor, Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, Centissimus Annus, "which provide Christian answers to the day-to-day problems of this world that you are looking for." Our "real culture" is not deficient, he says. What we have today is "not Filipino culture" but the result of "a cloning culture that went berserk. Ah, my dear young man, every culture is the result of cloning. It is just our tragedy we were immersed in the worst elements of Spanish and American culture.

Now to the majority who agree with our critique.

Atty. Ernie Dayor sometime ago in his column in the Visayan Tribune refers to this writer as "our modern Paul Revere" who "struggles to tell us where we are going, where we have gone wrong, offering concrete solutions to our crisis…His clarion call is truthful when he says the overarching issue facing us today is survival."

E. Nibungco of New York agrees that the true ills in the Philippines "are culture-based. Is there hope for reforms?" My friend, yes there is always hope for reforms. But they should come quick, tumbling down like a ton of bricks to make any difference. If within the half-year, these reforms do not come (for instance, the arrest and imprisonment of six of our most notorious crooks and criminals), then we could be in for more and more violence. Then the situation could be irreversible, and lead to Armaggedon.

The blizzard of letters on the subject of culture is a good, healthy and positive sign. It means the level of debate and discussion is going up and no longer limited to head-hunting, fault-finding, trivia-hairsplitting. If you notice, our democracy is now being dissected quite minutely, where before everybody took it for granted. Now some surveys show Filipinos divided on what political system is best for the Philippines – democracy which has so far failed or an authoritarian system which has succeeded in a number of Asian countries. Our neo-liberal, free enterprise economic system is also under scrutiny. It too has so far miserably misfired, as witness the growing gap between rich and poor. Yes, wrongly or rightly, our Roman Catholic Church now finds itself in the cross-hairs of criticism, at times searing.