Pinoy Inception

What do you feel when you think about where this country is headed? Hope? Excitement? Despair? Resignation? It can be a mixture of these things or mostly the unpleasant ones. With the bottomless national scandals, tasteless police reports, and basically just bad news sensationalized for maximum effect served to us 24/7, it shouldn’t be surprising that some of us have long ago forfeited our right to dream for this country.

And even when we do dream, my guess is these dreams are usually just the reverse or the negation of our problems, like:

“Sana wala ng mahirap” “Sana wala ng kurakot”; “Sana di na kailangang umalis ng bansa para makahanap ng trabaho” “Sana gumanda ganda naman ang mga lansangan” “Sana wala ng batang kalye” “Sana magresign na si ______(whoever’s in malacañang)

What’s wrong with that?

Well, I think they’re not powerful enough dreams. They’re just basically rants disguised as dreams. And so they still perpetuate that negativity we’re all so addicted to.

Now I’m not saying that dissecting and articulating our national malaise is pointless and futile. No. We need introspection. But we shouldn’t do it for its own sake. Our introspection should lead us to a shared dream.

The Koreans were united in their dream to outdo the Japanese, in everything, even in their kimchi. The Chinese were united in their dream to never be humiliated as a country and as a people again. The Malaysians share the dream to never be left far behind by their neighbor Singapore whose plea for integration they once rejected.

How about us? What’s our unifying dream and battle cry as a people? The operative word there is unifying. Our shared burden shouldn’t just be about our dislike and discontent for the government, under whosever regime. Such a burden is neither unifying (there will always be a pro- and anti-administration), nor compelling (we may succeed in overturning an administration or kicking out a president, but what’s next? Kick out the next one? more like a waste of energy, if you ask me).

How then are we going to discover that shared dream and burden, that battle cry that moves us as a people? What will it take to make us get our act together and finally re-create the Philippines that we can all be proud of?

I don't know. But I hope it will not take us more years of humiliation and more undignified lives.

I hope it’s soon, because I’m afraid I’m starting to ask what’s the point.