Birthday Girl

It sure hasn't been easy living in this country for the past 27 years...
Today is my 28th year living under the Filipino sun.
A lot has changed, and a lot has not changed.
What can I say... being pinoy is the best. Given the chance
I would love to be born pinoy again. For the simple reason that Filipinos
are on the middle of everything. We're not poor, but we're not rich either.
OK, mostly poor, but happy and poor.

Someone emailed me an article, from an American Expat. What he says is true.

read on:

The Philippines Through the Eyes of a Foreigner
Posted by: " Cavalier58@AOL.COM "


A Point of View
Inferiority Complex: A Filipino Malady?
by Barth Suretsky
_____

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 accommodate 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 into this lamentable 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!



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