Poppa Guv

The main cause of all our societal angst is the clash between idealism and cold, hard reality. If you read our constitution and the laws on the books, you'll find that it's all very Utopian in its outlook. I believe that the Philippines is a frustrated socialist country that dreams it could be like one of those fancy European welfare states. 

Every country gets the government it deserves. It's a bit too easy to blame the government for all our ills but we are a democracy, are we not? It's not like these politicians came down from a U.F.O. and into office. A missing piece of the jumbled puzzle that is our popular discourse is the role of the citizenry and its relationship to the government.

It all begins with the relationship. To cite as an example, and I'm not sure if this still applies today, the Americans have a view towards government that is different from ours. To the American, rights are God-given or, if you're not a believer, rights are "natural". The rights of a human being are inherent. Therefore, the role of the government is to safeguard those rights. The rights of a person do not depend on the grace of some governing body. As you would expect, this leads to a "people first" view on government. The government serves the people and is ultimately beholden to them. Hence, the stereotype of the gun-toting cowboy/redneck yelling about freedom and giving "the man" the middle finger.

How does the Filipino view the government? Whether through a quirk of history (colonialism), or whether through some kind of innate tendency, the Filipino sees the government as something above him. Government is separate from him. Though the Spaniards are gone, we still act as if our rulers have crowns. It's a very strange thing, it's almost monarchical or feudal the way this country operates. We view our leaders as either good kings or bad kings and the country prospers or suffers accordingly. We are democratic but we clearly believe in a very vertical hierarchy. We believe nothing can get done without the say so from on high. We have a "government first" view.

The attitude of the citizenry toward the government is like a child toward a parent. People, especially the poor, see the government as provider, i.e. "loving mother" or protector, i.e. "stern father". This is why I foresee the trajectory of Philippine society as inevitably ending in authoritarianism. Filipinos want to be taken care of. Personal freedom is not so highly prized and Filipinos tend to hesitate in acting independently. This is why socialism (we'll provide all) and authoritarianism (we kill the baddies) are very appealing. It's due to our doormat nature.

I hope I'm wrong but perhaps this theory will help explain why we ended up with someone like Duterte. Duterte is stern father. He's there to make the bad people go away so we can all have good beddy-byes at night. He'll solve all our problems. See? All we needed was the right leader, a good king. It seems that given enough time, voters will get it right.

Patriotism

Lack of patriotism among the youth is one of those problems that's simply assumed to exist. Ask any Juan de la Cruz on the street if the problem exists and you'll probably get a default "yes". It's a nebulous, immeasurable problem with no clear end state where we can consider it solved.  Really, it's looking like it's just an issue Martial Law Era dinosaurs bring up to moan about because those gosh darn millenials who don't know what it was like back in "those days".

The subject of patriotism is important, especially considering what day it is today.  It is important to love one's country although the subject of patriotism is hard to discuss. It's difficult because whatever discussion is to be had on the matter inevitably devolves into the usual motherhood statements and embarrassing romanticism of an ideal Philippines that probably didn't exist or probably won't.

First thing's first, there's no need to split hairs between "patriotism" and "nationalism". The terms are different despite being commonly used interchangeably. Regardless, I doubt any Filipino sincerely believes that the Filipino is superior to every other people on earth or that our country is the greatest ever. If anything, Filipino culture has many manifestations of an inferiority complex, such as the fetishization of foreign culture and the strange obsession with breeding with foreigners to produce mixed race Filipinos, but I digress. When I say "patriotism", I mean a simple love of country.

It is difficult to fall in love with the idea of the Philippines. A country isn't just some thought. Nobody ever fought for a country for the sake of it being on a map. There is this tendency to get one's head in the clouds when talking about something as lofty as patriotism. It's easier to understand if you ground it. A country isn't just a place and it's insane to love your country on a purely physical level, as in, love for the land, sea, air, flora, and fauna. The designated tourist spots of the Philippines are wonderful but it's silly to think of fighting for your country as fighting for inanimate objects.

To ground the idea of patriotism to make it easier to grasp, we must think of our country as having an economic dimension and a social dimension. It is economic in that the country is a place where one has the opportunity to gather resources/make a living for himself. It's a place to live and prosper. It is social in that a country is always made up of people. I don't mean just the government, but the Filipino people as a whole, our culture, language, etc.

When you talk of love of country, it encompasses all these things. It's curious how when we are told to love the "Philippines", but to say nothing of loving the people within it. A country is like a franchise, a common investment that we partake in for the common good. It is inescapable that to be a patriot is to cast one's lot into this enterprise with the full trust and confidence that it will be for his own good, his children and his fellow tribe/nation.

That's why it's difficult to be a true patriot in the Philippines. I maintain that the Philippines is a fundamentally fragmented country. We were never one people before we became one country. We are divided in ethnicity, language, region, wealth, and education. I see very little love of country among my fellow man to be honest, and not just from the pesky millennials. Everyone is out for himself. Ours is a low-trust society where the naive will be taken advantage of. At best, nobody gives a damn about the greater whole. Ever heard of the tragedy of the commons? The Philippines is that writ large.

There can be no patriotism if there is no feeling of a shared fate; a shared destiny. 

Patriotism is never a solo thing. If not for your countryman, it's for your posterity. Patriotism requires community and a sense of togetherness. It's never a thing that lives for the moment, either. Patriotism reveres the past and aspires to the future.

Am I a patriot? I'll be honest, probably not. I feel no attachment to anything and I feel like nobody cares about me anyway. Sometimes I feel like an alien, like it's just a quirk of fate that I was even born here. What do I have to believe in? Everyone lives for the moment and the people in charge don't seem to have a vision for the future. In the end, I'm just one guy howling in a hurricane, writing digital words that nobody reads.

Well, happy Independence Day.

フレデリック「オドループ」Music Video | Frederic "oddloop"