Nothing beats the Filipino resiliency

I was watching TFC (nothing compares to the Filipino sense of humor) last weekend and something struck a chord in me: with all the troubles an ordinary Filipino meets throughout his daily grind, he still finds the time to have a MagicMic session with his family and friends at the end of the day.

Imagine living in a country where what you earn in a day isn’t even enough to cover for your family’s daily expenses, where you always get stuck in a traffic jam going to and from work for almost 2 hours, where roads are not well maintained and are flooded even with just a light drizzle, where prices of oil increases almost everyday, where transportation prices can hike up almost 30%, where you would fear meeting a cop as much as meeting a burglar, where politicians don’t keep their promises, pocket the country’s funds, cheat on elections, receive bribery from every crook, and even have the gall to kiss a bishop’s ring. I grew-up in that country and loves that country still, even with all the bad memories and shameful stories it brings.

What happened to the Filipino people that Ninoy Aquino once thought that was “worth dying for”? (Forget about Kris, I’m pretty sure that all the things she had done had kept her father rolling on his grave like a spinning top.) Where’s the Filipino that Rizal and Bonifacio bravely fought and died for?

They are still there waiting for another “messiah” to release them from the bondage of poverty and oppression. More than a hundred years had passed and yet the little brown man is still downtrodden. Three hundred years of Spanish occupation, 50 years of American colonization, 20 years under the Martial Law, and another 20 years of struggling in the claws of a group of jokers, when can the Filipino find its well deserved freedom – freedom from poverty, freedom from tyranny?

I do hope that that will be answered in my lifetime. And while we wait, watch us find the humor in our troubles by watching our sitcoms, listening to our phones’ ringtones and re-mix cd’s of phone conversations. Or better yet, join us in another round of videoke sessions.

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. – Dwight D. Eisenhower