‘We settle for less. We complain about our political leaders but we keep voting them back into office.’
THERE’S a great thing about seeing more and more Filipinos travel abroad: they get to see the world beyond their towns and cities and can see the “what can be” reality in other lands that can become aspirational back home.
Sixty years ago, my ninong and his brother became two of only a handful of Filipinos who migrated to Canada. Filipinos in Canada were rare — and the brothers even had to leave the Philippines without their mother knowing because she would have surely stopped them.
Canada was like a universe away; in the 60s you were almost as good as being on Mars because there was no way to talk to you on demand.
My parents, too, were perhaps among only a handful of Filipinos in “rural” Iowa in the 1960s when a State Department grant allowed them to go “stateside” for further training in their chosen fields of medicine and nursing. Traveling abroad was a rarity, so much so that when my father was leaving for the US, he was seen off by his relatives from Laguna in enough numbers that made it seem like half the townsfolk were at the old Manila International Airport to wish him bon voyage. My father’s itinerary was a hop jump packers the Pacific onboard a turboprop plane and he and my mother communicated with us via handwritten aerogram letters and big spools of taped messages, without which they would have disappeared from our consciousness.
Today, a Filipino gets on a plane and in less than half a day is halfway around the world. He picks up his phone and talks, live, to loved ones left behind. Being aboard is sometimes just like being next door, or somewhere on the next street.
But being “next door” has also opened the eyes of millions of Filipinos to how things are in other lands. One of the most conspicuous items of comparison is (not surprisingly) airports.
And public transport systems. And infrastructure. Malls and buildings and even healthcare.
When it became more possible for more Filipinos to travel, it also became more common for traveling Filipinos to say, “Bakit hindi ganito sa atin?”
But the answer is simple.
We settle for less. We complain about our political leaders but we keep voting them back into office. So yes, they’re the problem, but we are the even more basic problem. We settle for less. We are content with the “pwede na yan.” And that’s why when we compare home with abroad, we almost always end up comparing our country negatively with the lands we can visit.
Bakit hindi ganito sa atin? Because we tolerate mediocrity. Because we do not wish to take the extra responsibility that will attach to us if we demand more from our leaders.
And so, because we settle for less, we get what we are willing to settle for.
