Damage Culture

Reading a foreign authored article talking about my country and my fellow countrymen focusing on its wrongs from his selective experiences and secondary sources, was a bit unacceptable to me. He writes as if he experienced personally the struggles of my brothers and sisters during the Marcos regime. He writes as if he was a Filipino or been here in the Philippines for a long time. He writes as if he really knew the Philippines and the Filipinos. To me it’s like, “who do you think you are telling all of these”? But that was just my first my impression on the article.
Everyone is entitled to express his opinion. I realize that somehow or it could be really true that what Fallows said on his article was right. Why do you think the Philippines instead of growing, we move backwards? Why do you think our neighbors who have less or little resources compared to us have left us behind? Was it really because of our government? A lot of questions will arise, it could be indefinite but there could only be one answer to all of this – nationalism.
For a long time we’ve been living on our own. Yes we strive, we persevere, we’re determined but it’s all for ourselves, for our family, for our love ones, never for everyone. We care too much about ourselves and to our priorities in life that we create our own circles. We’ve loss the sense of oneness. We’ve loss the identity of Filipino. We are divided and through this we define our weakness. I will not disagree nor agree on Fallows’ analysis on the politics and other aspects of our country but I affirm his thesis that culture could be the driving reason of one’s country fall or rise.