Rough Patch

Many have speculated the reasons for the Philippines’ failure to rise with its southeast asian neighbours. For one, Jose Rizal, the country’s national hero, blamed its being a tropical country as one of the reasons for the indolence of the Filipino people that led to its stunted growth. He argued that countries with less warm weathers can easily work at any time of the day; Filipinos, even then, struggle to work in the wee hours of the afternoon because of the hateful temperature. We have to admit – the sometimes humid, sometimes skin-cancer triggering temperature does play a large role in our productivity and willingness to work.

In a recent post by Tyne Villan for the Inquirer Pop, he blamed the resilience of the Filipinos and that it led to our escapism and our settlement for less than what we deserve. Indeed, we had become too optimistic that we’d rather wait for the tables to turn than be the instrument to facilitate its turning.

While both may be true, I personally think that the issue with the Filipino people is our band-aid mentality. When something is wrong, we put a temporary fix, hoping that it will one day come altogether and fix itself. To allow low-income Filipinos to afford products for daily living, we produce instants and sachets to get small portions of what we need when we need them and hope that it will compensate for the country’s high inflation rate. When there are road holes, we patch them with just enough amount of cement, until such time that the holes are too big for temporary mending. When typhoons come, we prepare evacuation centers and plan rescue operations, and go back, business-as-usual, to our old ways after the storm. When we elect the wrong officials, we settle for the “at leasts” and stick to our beliefs so as not to lose our pride and continue to hope that the next official is better. When choosing a career, we are programmed to pursue what’s practical and what’s needed now and hope that one day, we’d be able to pursue our actual dreams.

Even sachets and instants are pricing more than we can afford; more roads get broken than fixed; the storms grow stronger and the floods get worse; and the election becomes the selection of the lesser-evil rather than the best-fit. We are getting too old to postpone what we’re meant to become.

We have to start removing our individual patches and allow the wounds to heal permanently. It’s time to realize that we are running out band-aids.