Going by the lavish weddings and parties that get splashed in the news with annoying frequency, you have to continually remind yourself that you’re not living in Manila, not some California dream town or Latin gilded ghetto.
When I talk of the good life, I mean living in a society where you do not have to kill for creature comforts, life isn’t a zero-sum game, and, well, you aren’t deemed weird for taking time to smell the flowers.
The good life doesn’t necessarily apply to rich societies. Wealth helps, but there’s the dark side of crass materialism and of confusing money for happiness. Moderately well-off societies can be better for the soul. The basics of life can be attended to without too much surplus to encourage self-indulgence and decadence. People, in short, discover the virtues of moderation, of taking only what’s needed and of sharing bounties with their fellow citizens. It’s the exact opposite of a culture of scarcity.
Until I left the country in early 1970, I had few doubts that the good life was not an impossible dream in the Philippines. The country seemed reasonably prosperous. Our self-confidence as a people was very much intact. On trips to Hong Kong, it was reassuring to note that all those foreigners had that we didn’t have we’re luxury items that we could only afford through smuggling. I spent four months as an exchange student in a Japan that still sported the drab and Spartan look over its remarkable ancient culture.
What struck me about Taipei was that it was reminiscent of Cotabato of the 1950s in its underdevelopment. More a city under siege, it seemed hopelessly dusty and gray. Its sullen citizens evoked our stereotypes of emaciated Chinese wearing nothing but rubber slippers and undershirts.
The good life was within reach in our country, so I thought, because we had the most modern society in Asia. We spoke English. We saw Hollywood movies. We practiced the wave of the future that was called Democracy.
Then as now, when I look back to my growing years in Bukidnon, I find little to complain about and much to be thankful for. Sure, my siblings and I felt somewhat deprived compared to our Manila cousins.
But precisely, we lived in what could only have been the equivalent of the old American frontier. Ours was a rugged but thriving part of a small nation that was on the march. A nation with a future.
Far as we were from the center of civilization, the Irish Jesuits blessed us with a decent library in the first floor of their convent. It was there that I spent much of my bookworm youth devouring inexhaustible reading fare I imagined other kids growing up in rural Michigan were treating themselves to. For news, there was the radio, then in its early transistor stage, and the Manila papers which came on the daily PAL DC-3, when it wasn’t raining.
As for entertainment, we had a moviehouse that showed double-bills of what later would be hailed as Hollywood classics. It was in our niparoofed Midway Theater that I first saw Rome though the eyes of Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday. I had fantasies of how I would walk the streets of New York, London or Paris long before I ever set foot in those wonderful cities beginning only in the 1970s.
There was no doubt at all that I would get the best college education in the land, get a good job and perhaps be famous enough to put my little hometown on the map. Dad belonged to the Lions Club. Mom was in the Puericulture Center and all other women’s organizations. My brothers and I were Cubs and then Boy Scouts. Our only sister was a Girl Scout.
So seemingly solid were the middle class foundations of my life that all throughout my exile years in America I regarded the Marcos dictatorship as a political aberration, a passing storm. The nightmare would be over in God’s good time and we could thereafter resume our interrupted lives.
How utterly wrong I had been and how far the dream had faded into oblivion became clear when I returned to post-Marcos Manila. Everywhere I looked there were slums and traffic jams. It was like arriving in hell.
More unnerving was the apparent death of the Filipino spirit. Politics brought out the worst in our character. True, we grumbled a lot in the old days. But we were not awash with cynicism. Immigration wasn’t an option. Ours was a working democracy, chaotic only because it was free.
But is the good life really dead? It’s hard to tell. You have to look beyond the daily aggravations, the crumbling structures of nationhood, the creeping sense of doom and gloom. You have to tell yourself that happiness is ultimately a state of mind. Running away can only be the coward’s way out. As the saying goes, bloom where you’re planted or not bloom at all.