A Country In Desperate Search of the Heroic

Got this from Inquirer​.Net. It’s an email sent by a cer­tain Manuel Almario. The recent Des­per­ate House­wives inci­dent once again showed how des­per­ate (par­don the pun) we are for respect and under­stand­ing from the rest of the world. That other cory aquino–is-a-slut brouhaha on the Daily Show brought on a new onslaught of cry­ing and wail­ing and gnash­ing of teeth despite the obvi­ous fact that Com­edy Central’s The Daily Show is really just that: comedy.

Maybe I am miss­ing some­thing here. Not protest­ing against peo­ple who call my coun­try­men (even if it’s Tita Cory) “slut” or less-than-educated might be a sign that I am not as patri­otic as I hope to be.

But patriotism–I think–is more than loud protests and cries of foul. I do not know if the same peo­ple who cry foul and protest over def­i­n­i­tions of the word “Fil­ip­ina” and of using the word Fil­ipino for dark choco­late bars are really, deep in their heart, patri­otic as well.

As with every­thing in my life, I do pick my bat­tles. I will def­i­nitely not fight with some­one who calls Manny Pac­quiao a washed-up fighter. But I will stop every­thing I do and go to the mall to watch a Pac­quiao fight on widescreen cin­ema. And if I have the money, I would go to Las Vegas to watch it live.

As with every­thing in life, we have things we are very pas­sion­ate about and we’ll even kill for and there are things we just let go. Know­ing (and dis­cern­ing) which ones are worth dying for and which ones are not is what sep­a­rates the men from the boys.

Keep walk­ing.

The arti­cle:
MANILA, philip­pines — “Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes,” said Bertolt Brecht, the famous Ger­man playwright.

If Brecht is right, then the Philip­pines is indeed an unhappy land. It is so much in need of heroes that it searches under every rock for heroes. It also explains why Fil­ipinos prac­ti­cally go into hys­ter­ics in exal­ta­tion of Manny Pac­quiao. Truly in the field of box­ing, he is one of our greats and one of the world’s greats. But aren’t we over­do­ing it? After all, in sports, it is the num­ber of medals won, not just a soli­tary vic­tory, that accords pres­tige to a country.

We ele­vate our over­seas Fil­ipino work­ers as modern-day heroes which they might well deserve. But in doing so, we demote the hum­ble farmer, fish­er­man, waiter, doc­tor, nurse, engi­neer, street sweeper who stays despite star­va­tion wages to build and feed the nation. Hence the local Fil­ipino is con­di­tioned to stand in awe of every balik­bayan sim­ply because he or she earns in dol­lars. Every waiter, taxi dri­ver or jan­i­tor who returns a wal­let is lion­ized as if hon­esty is a rare virtue among Fil­ipinos. In fact, Fil­ipinos have been known for their hon­esty since pre-Spanish times. Just ask Rizal.

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