Filipinos have always (supposedly) been thought of as people with strong values, values about work and sacrifice. These values have always been a cornerstone to success by most Filipinos — it is a testament that Filipinos here and abroad do well, once they focus on something and work hard on it they will become successful and will succeed. But the sad flip side of it is the tendency to be complacent, as strong as our beliefs are on hard work (masipag) there is a disturbingly set of what I believe are contradicting values (matiisin). While these values are really good for the short term, the risk is if we mistakenly accept these values as norms in our lives.
We have these sayings that epitomize the rationale of these values, sayings such as “pag maiksi ang kumot matutuong bumaluktot” (if the blanket is short, learn to adjust/fit). I actually like this value, but don’t think that I like it for the long-term, I see these sayings as only being interpreted for the short term while your other values of being resourceful and hard-working come into play to get you out of such predicament. Complacency and learning to accept hard-life can be a tragedy in our own lives, it robs you of aspirations and sense of attaining something, it can put you in a box, a mindset of thinking “I can live with it”.
It maybe the reason why the slogan: “Tama na, Sobra na, Palitan na” back in the Marcos days was very effective, that slogan pretty much mobilized people to actually do something. Filipinos must adjust to hard-life, but adjust only in a temporary fashion, they must look beyond this hardship and actually do something — if something is not working, live it with (for now) but work on changing it. I think we Filipinos should take our lives and destiny a little bit more seriously, bad roads, bad jobs, bad officials, bad government — we must learn to work hard to change it, don’t adjust to it for the long term. It starts with our mindset, if there’s one thing we can learn from America’s recent election — it’s that yes we can dream and yes we can make it!
