Cusp of greatness

(This was the talk I gave at the recent Gawad Kalinga Hope Ball in New Jersey. It’s one way of looking at recent events from a broader perspective.)

Many years ago, a friend of mine invited me to the opening of a Filipino press club in the United States. But of course I’ll attend, I said, and expressed elation that the place would finally have a Filipino press club. Oh, he said, it’s not the first, it’s the third. It was the third Filipino press club being launched there.

What happened? I asked. Well, he answered, the guy who lost in the election in the first press club decided to split after some time and put up his own press club. Then the guy who lost the election in the second press club decided to split after some time and put up his own press club.

My friend understood that it was such a small place to have three Filipino press clubs in, but what could he do? The people who put up the third press club were his friends, too, which was why he had agreed to invite people to its launching.

I did not go on to ask if there would be a fourth.

I guess that’s a fairly familiar experience to you. We Filipinos can’t seem to get our act together, we Filipinos can’t seem to stay together. We split from organizations, we split from teams, we even split from the country. The only thing we can’t seem to split from is our spouses, but that is not out of extraordinary loyalty, that is only out of the extraordinary policy of the Philippine Catholic Church banning divorce. A proscription Filipino males, in particular, remedy by extraordinary extracurricular activity. But that’s another story.

In fact, we even like to split from ourselves, to go by the split personalities many of our controversial public officials exhibit. You saw that only recently in the ex-Chief Justice who stood trial for a variety of sins and trotted out a variety of personalities, saintly and devilish, judicious and devious.

Whatever the cause of this, it’s turned us into a people that have fallen low in the esteem of our neighbors, and even lower in our own eyes. We like to disparage ourselves, also called crab mentality; we like to think others are better, also called colonial mentality. For four decades now, since martial law, our mindset has been one of getting by. Where other countries think of excellence and transcendence, we think of recovery and survival. Where other countries think of moving mountains, we think of moving, well, whatever it is we move in the john.

You see that in the awe-inspiring difference between us and the Japanese. Last April was the first anniversary of the earthquake/tsunami that laid low Iwate Prefecture in Tohoku, and the Internet carried pictures of the place one year after. The contrast between the shambles it was in the aftermath of the disaster and its restoration to what it was before, if not to something better, was mind-boggling. You’d think that place had never been devastated. You’d think those lives had never been lost. One is tempted to say that that recovery is nothing short of miraculous, but that is not so to the Japanese. For them recovery is not an option, it is a given. Recovery is not something talked about, recovery is not something striven for, recovery is something merely done.

A country like that doesn’t just survive, it triumphs.

By contrast, we remain in a mode where our leaders and we ourselves debate endlessly how we may recover, how we may survive. It is a lack of capacity to think heroically and act heroically. Or as I like to put it: Other people make love, other people make war, we just make do.

What makes all this astonishing is that we have an astonishing tradition of heroism. We have an astonishing array of accomplishments to make us proud of ourselves, to make us think there are no limits to what we can do.

We were, as P-Noy pointed out in his Independence Day message, the first country in Asia to rise up against colonial rule. What makes that all the more astonishing is that unlike the Latin American revolutions of the 1820s which were led by the homegrown elite or local bourgeoisie, ours was led by the plebeian. The Katipunan was founded and spurred to action not by a member of the landed class or the ilustrado but by a plebeian who sold canes and fans in Tondo. Well before Lenin led his uprising in Russia and Mao his own in China, Andres Bonifacio rose up against Spanish rule in the Philippines. Bonifacio (and later Emilio Aguinaldo) of course failed where the other two succeeded, largely because America gatecrashed the party and stole the prom queen, but that does not make the venture any less grand or heartwarming.

Just as well we were the first country in the world to mount People Power. The concept of civil disobedience was there before, the concept of peaceful revolution was there before. But nobody had the imagination, or instinct, or inspired madness to suddenly and spontaneously join others in front of the camps, defying the guns defying the tanks, defying his abject opinion of himself, other than the Filipino. And having done so, turned the event into a burst of colors, into an explosion of song, into a frantic, kaleidoscopic, mélange of images typified by a nun adorning the mouth of the cannon of a tank with a garland of flowers. The tourism department is right: It’s more fun in the Philippines. Even our uprisings are so.

And still just as well, we’ve managed to impeach a president and a chief justice, both of whom ended in a conviction. The first rendered by the people themselves, the second by the people whom the people had tasked to represent them.