25/02/2025
When I took the picture of this flag, I never felt so proud to be a Filipino.
But what is interesting is the gradual descent of that feeling, in a way that we receive dopamine in our brain, and that descent into our normal state of being.
Today marks the anniversary of the Edsa Revolution. A time of change, reform, and freedom from oppression. It's times like these that remind us of what we can do for our country and not what the government can do for us. Here we displayed a triumph of unity to topple a dictatorship. This is the moment where we found what democracy meant.
Fast forwarding to today, I tremble with this knowledge, knowing that we once had the drive to work together to fight for our rights and protect our dignity. Now in an age of information that de-evolved into misinformation. From the ashes we once came from, we tried to build from the ruin, but alas, we are still in that ruin. Coveted in the sphere of greed, in the pursuit of enriching the self and not caring about the neighbor.
Am I proud to be a Filipino? A difficult question indeed, I am still criticized for how I am not considered to be a Filipino by the way I speak, look, and carry. Highly influenced by American values and culture. Yet I have never set foot in America, or any of those Western countries, yet people still tend to think that I am not Filipino despite my efforts.
I've been to both public and private schools throughout my life, and experienced different cultures from Muslim, Bisaya, and Tagalog, from the highest society to the most humble of communities, I've had a taste of what it was like to live in the many ways of life our countrymen live in. I was born in Manila, and I grew up in Manila. Yet I am still not a Filipino.
My personal experience in this dissonance of what people think, helps me understand this division among our people. How we think, and our perspectives in the different cultures that we interpret as Filipino. My conclusion is that we lack that sense of National identity. The spirit of what we identify as Filipino. If I ask you what is a Flipino, you will have different answers as compared to the person next to you if I asked you individually. There are still common grounds for what we know definitively as Filipino. But ultimately, we have a hard time agreeing to that penultimate definition.
That's why I'm an advocate for history, just as in the works of Rizal who once said "Know History, Know Self. No History, No Self"
This is a hard pill to swallow, but I am still hopeful one day that we'll recover from this chaos and division that consumes us in the troubled times we live in. We're on the brink of a global crisis, on the edge and threat of war, and national instability.
What can one do but hope? Hope is what drives us, action is what changes us. With that, I would like to say
Note:
This is the Philippine Flag in front of the National Museum, I think it's proper that it should known. As I think this is the symbol of hope from our history.
