Why we’re losers?

We Filipinos are into a fit of self-pity these days. We wonder why we are so corrupt, why our country is such a receptable for spiraling crime and violence, why our poverty is one of the worst in Asia, why our countrymen are leaving by the droves because they have lost hope of any future here. And yet as we wonder, there is an even more striking phenomenon. We don’t sink into any kind of depression as would be the normal reaction. Nor do we go to the wailing wall to cry ourselves a river. In the time it takes the reader to read this paragraph, we Filipinos shrug off our worries and just move on.

Then we do the thing we do best. We smile, a huge, dormitory-wide smile. And when everything else fails, we sing and we pray. Within the rags of the Filipino, according to Fr. Horacio de la Costa, are concealed two priceless jewels. The jewel of song and the jewel of prayer. With those jewels, we survive. Indeed, the Filipino has a genius for song, a jubilant, carefree and tropic-shredded beat as in Leron, Leron Sinta, and a plaintive, certainly melancholy beat, a near stifling nationalistic sob, as in Bayan Ko. Fr. James Reuters, my neighbor columnist, has also extolled the legendary gaiety of the Filipino family.

We might also add that, perhaps, the Filipino comes second to none in his patience, his resignation, his capacity to bear suffering and oppression.

It is this unique wine-press of patience and resignation, this wrenching away from a dynamic culture that extols and encourages change, that perhaps explains the Filipino best as he enters the 21st century. How else explain near indifference to Transparency International’s finding that the Philippines is the 11th most corrupt country in the world? How else explain his stoic forbearance about the squalor he lives in, the mounting garbage, the murderous criminals who have now penetrated his neighborhood, his inability even helplessness to feed his family adequately?

Why does the Filipino seek refuge inward, instead of seeking redress outward? By this I mean, he does not stalk the streets, raise his angry, avenging fists, bellow his anger at all this injustice, shout revolution as the communists urge him to do?

Instead, he seeks the shelter of spiritual solace. See him, look at him, regard him. He teems by the thousands, by the tens of thousands when the Black Nazarene’s carriage rumbles the streets of Quiapo, rushing to fondle the Nazarene’s feet or robe or anything he can touch. The hope surges, the heart leaps. In so doing, he shares Jesus Christ’s suffering, and there lies salvation. See him again, regard him. In many fiestas having to do with the Virgin Mary, the Filipino pours out in a human sea to witness the spectacle, to pray, to venerate, to unburden his heart. Mother Mary is woman, and Mother Mary understands. And Mother Mary will intercede.

Just recently, in Bicolandia, there was this fluvial feast of Nuestra Señora de Peñafrancia. Huge boats teemed with humanity, like bulging grape-clusters following in colorful formation during that fluvial parade. This was devotional adoration carried to a frenzy. Who cared about GMA? Who cared about the Abu Sayyaf? Who cared that the country was not going well? Miracles do happen, don’t they? Well, the Blessed Virgin would take stock of all their prayers, all their dreams, all their hopes. They would all go home in solace because they had set eyes on the Virgin, Nuestra Señora and prayed to her.

It is rather late in my life as journalist that I am getting to understand the Filipino much better.

I must confess that I probably do not think, act, or behave like the typical Filipino. I did believe, however, the Filipino, like many of his neighbors in Asia, would one day discover he was lost. And discovering he was lost, realize why he had fallen so far behind his neighbors. They had rescued themselves from millennial poverty in just 30 years. And now, they were living the good life. I talk, of course, of China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Hongkong, Thailand, Taiwan, Malaysia. Why had they succeeded in building bridges in the future? And now could purchase brand-new automobiles, shop at the fanciest malls, eat all the good food they want to eat, educate their children properly? Travel abroad even?

Now, I think I know.

It was as Samuel P. Huntington related in comparing Ghana and South Korea. In the early 1960s, their economies were roughly the same. "Thirty years later," Huntington narrates, "South Korea had become an industrial giant with the fourteenth largest economy in the world, multinational corporations, and a per capita income approximating that of Greece. No such changes had occurred in Ghana, whose per capita income was now one-fifteenth that of South Korea’s… Culture had to be a large part of the explanation. South Koreans valued thrift, investment, hard work, education, organization and discipline. Ghanians had different values."

Replace Ghana with the Philippines and you have the same picture. Ghana was devoured by tradition, folklore, free spending, Africa’s frenzy for whooping it up, dancing, the primitive but exhilarating mumbo-jumbo of African tribal rites.

I have often been baffled no end while talking to some men of the cloth and even some educated friends. They take Philippine poverty for granted and even if they don’t, it doesn’t unsettle them at all. Some Roman Catholic priests, like Bishop Soc Villegas, have been quoted as saying the poor and poverty must be loved. Physical and material suffering after all is earthly, transient, temporary. The riches of the soul will be rewarded in Paradise. Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the kingdom of heaven. All that spiritual jazz really, truly spins me around like a drunken top.

And yet, the irony of it all was once upon a time Filipinos rebelled against their fate.

Andres Bonifacio and his Katipuneros could not stand the brutal, ruthless colonial rule of Spain and rose in arms. When the United States took over the Castille on the pretense of "christianizing" Filipinos, Filipinos fought back with a fury that cost the country hundreds of thousands of lives. When Japan struck at Pearl Harbor and then the Philippines, Filipino guerrillas sprang all over the country, bloodied Dai Nippon in many a battle, subdued Gen. Tomoyuke Yamashita, the Tiger of Malaya, at Besang Pass.

We earned our independence twice from foreign rule, the first from Spain, however, fleeting and illusory it was, the second from America which we paid for with blood, fire and guts during four years of Japanese occupation. And so we were set free again July 4, 1946. And yet, another irony, the Filipino dreams was to live under America, or like America, be a state of the United States. There was no dream of economic development, of hard, unrelenting work, of climbing the steep cliffs of political and social progress, of finally reaching the top and spreading out fulfilled as a nation.

Hell, no, we wanted to live the American way of life immediately. We had finally become the Little Brown Brother.

The Filipino ilustrado class had become enamored of Yankee culture. It little realized this culture was the result of over 200 years of moulting the Old World that was Europe, and setting up a new civilization on the lush, fertile, wide open prairie that was America. And yet, as America beckoned, Mother Spain was also buried deep in the Filipino, the ultra-conservative Roman Catholic religion of Spain then. And beneath that religion, the animist belief and practices of the sprawling tribal archipelago that Ferdinand Magellan came upon.

Was it really true? The Philippines was and remains a result of about 400 years of the convent under Spain, 50 years of Hollywood under America.

Is that the reason for inertia? Centifugal and centripetal forces pulling at the Philippines with the same force the nation is mired in a cultural quagmire? We have all the gaps, the skill gap, the competence gap, the wage gap, the technological gap, the rich-poor gap. Are we Filipinos then a stranger to East and Southeast Asia, deep in the currents of a different civilization which the West was never able to obliterate? Is that why we yearn for equality in poverty, which David Landes said "is a common feature of all peasant civilizations around the world?"

But we Filipinos have to move, we have to change, we have to get out of our rut.

But I see no such deep yearning in our middle society. The only problem, they say, is lack of leadership. Would this leadership be forthcoming in the 2004 elections? Let’s see what happens, is the answer. FPJ? Jeezus. Then I ask what I think is the all-important question. How do we feed 80 million Filipinos today? How do we feed 100 million Filipinos in the year 2012? Will we allow them to starve? Shrug of the shoulders. Move on.

Small wonder we have sunk this low – Asia’s perennial losers.