Over the last few weekends, I’ve been watching movies on Philippine history. I was watching General Luna, seemingly the one good guy in that movie who wanted discipline and unification among the troops, get hacked to death in a Kill Bill Korean zombie-like way.
Somewhere in the middle of the film, he tells his comrade, “Ganito ba ang tadhana natin? Kalaban ang kalaban, kalaban ang kakampi. Nakakapagod.” If only he saw the state of the nation he fought so hard for today—nakakapagod indeed.
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What are we free from?
After binge-watching and reading more about our history, it seems we were screwed from the start. Subjugated under Spain, sold off to America, then held hostage by our own government. Manuel L. Quezon famously stated: “I would rather have a government run like hell by Filipinos than a government run like heaven by Americans.”
What we would all give for a little piece of heaven now. We work hard, only to have our money stolen; we face injustice at every turn, and daily life for the average Filipino is hard. Even foreigners in our own country have a lot more freedom and privileges than the average Filipino. It’s our 128th anniversary of independence, but what exactly are we free from?
Watching what is happening to our country has been particularly hard this past year. Corruption, indiscriminate cutting down of old trees around Metro Manila, the Senate and all its antics, and all of those who get away with doing whatever they want. In the meantime, gas, electricity, and food prices have soared, rolling brownouts are back like it’s the ‘90s, and no one of any notoriety has been arrested.
An uphill battle
I’m raising two teenagers, and the way things are going now, I am inclined to tell them to pursue a future somewhere else. Growing up, my mom always instilled in us to “come back to the Philippines, and share what you learned abroad.” Love of country and an interest in nationhood were things my sister and I grew up with. A desire to help and put resources and knowledge to good use was always something I wanted to do as a good citizen.
However, the more I got involved in community work, LGU work, and even helping with national-level programs, the more I found everything to be an uphill battle. It’s exhausting—depressing even. At one point, seeing the lines and lines of people standing for hours waiting for a basket of food tore my heart in half. I got a fever from the heat, and was so upset seeing it all.
The “systems” of automation and digitization are not efficient. At lunch the other day, someone suggested that “donut diplomacy” was still the best way to get things done—literally show up with a box of donuts and get your stuff processed by the government office face-to-face.
I recently applied for a DSWD Minors Traveling Abroad (MTA) permit. I had made about five or six mistakes on the form, and yet, these mistakes resulted in them sending me back one mistake at a time to correct, one per day. It took a total of eight days longer—just to iron everything out. One “mistake” even included the fact that the officer who checked my application decided that “study tour” was more appropriate than “summer camp” despite our entire group choosing the “study tour” option.
Tiny, petty things that eat away at your soul daily.
The body tires, the spirit follows
Metro Manila’s traffic is not merely an inconvenience—it is a thief of irreplaceable hours. Commuters in the National Capital Region spend an average of two to three hours traveling each way, sometimes more. That is four to six hours a day sitting in gridlock, on overcrowded buses, waiting for jeepneys that may or may not arrive.
This is time that cannot be spent with children. Time that cannot be spent sleeping, healing, learning, or dreaming. The commuting crisis disproportionately crushes the working class, who cannot afford to live near their workplaces and who lack the option of remote work. The body tires. The spirit follows.
Inflation has been quietly devastating Filipino households. The cost of rice—the emotional and literal center of every Filipino meal—has become a source of anxiety. When rice becomes expensive, something deeper than the economy breaks. It is a cultural wound. Families who once cooked freely now measure every cup. The minimum wage in many regions has lagged so far behind the cost of living that even two working parents can struggle to keep a household above water.
Electricity bills remain among the highest in Southeast Asia. Fuel prices ripple through the cost of every commute, every jeepney fare, every delivery. The math of surviving a month in the Philippines has become genuinely difficult for millions, and the cruelest part is that working harder rarely seems to change the equation.
Politics in the Philippines can feel like a cycle with no exit. Dynasty after dynasty. Familiar surnames on every ballot. Corruption cases that drag on for decades, verdicts that never come, or come too softly to matter. Disinformation spreads faster than accountability. Social media, which once promised democratization of information, has become a battlefield of manufactured realities.
Young Filipinos who care—and so many do—often describe a profound exhaustion: of fighting, of hoping, of watching good people lose to well-funded machinery. Cynicism is not apathy. It is the scar tissue of repeated disappointment.
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“Filipinos are resilient”
Perhaps the most insidious burden Filipinos carry is the way their suffering is reframed as a virtue. Matibay ang Pilipino. Filipinos are resilient. It is said with pride, and the pride is real—but it is also used, consciously or not, to normalize conditions that should not be normalized.
When a typhoon levels a village and the international community marvels at how quickly Filipinos smile and rebuild, something important goes unsaid: They had to rebuild again because the systems that should have protected them failed again. Resilience should not be a substitute for infrastructure. Survival should not be mistaken for thriving.
The same culture that has been tested by centuries of colonization, natural disaster, poverty, and political betrayal has produced a people of staggering warmth. Walk into any Filipino home, and you will be fed before you are asked why you came. Mano po—the gesture of pressing an elder’s hand to one’s forehead—is respect made physical, tenderness made ritual. The bayanihan spirit, neighbors literally carrying a house together, is not mythology. It shows up in relief operations, in neighborhood palengkes, and in group chats organizing help for someone in need.
What Filipinos truly deserve
Filipino creativity is a quiet miracle. With almost nothing, Filipinos make everything. Jeepneys are kinetic art. Lechon is engineering. OPM has given the world voices of extraordinary range and feeling. Filipino literature, film, and visual art punch far above the weight of the resources their creators had access to.
Filipino humor is not escapism. It is philosophy. To joke in the face of a flooded street, to meme a political scandal into absurdity, to laugh at a brownout with candles lit—this is not denial. It is a refusal to be fully crushed. It is dignity wearing a different face.
The young generation of Filipinos is, frankly, remarkable. They are more educated, more globally connected, more politically conscious, and more willing to demand accountability than any generation before them. They call out injustice in two languages. They build businesses from bedrooms. They organize communities online and offline. They have not given up—they have simply stopped being polite about what they deserve.
And what they deserve—what every Filipino deserves—is a country that finally catches up to the caliber of its people.
