Cultural Schizophrenia: The Filipino Experience

I recently read an FB post complaining about how Google is more interested in one's language than one's country. The poster seems to imply that this is rediculus and superfluous. This is in response to Google adding Cebuano as a language beside Filipino in its search bar.

Threads spoke Filipino and Tagalog being essentially the same, another poster added, isn't this stupid? The FB complainer also compared Filipino and Tagalog as like renaming English to British. I was aghast, and all these coming from Filipinos!

First things first, Filipino is Tagalog, Tagalog is Filipino - at least for now. That is true! Without a doubt. However, Filipino and Tagalog are more than just verbal jousting, it is the story of the Filipino people's arduous struggle to conceive of a comprehensive and inclusive national identity in order to build a working democracy, a democracy that is still in need of a lot of working and a national identity that is anything but comprehensive and inclusive - precisely because the Filipino historical drama is filled with the rape and systematic bastardization of our consciousness as a nation, ensuring that external powers will be able to throw its weight around like a rampaging bull African elephant! Furthermore, the Filipino language is the struggle to incarnate a modern, flexible, and dynamic language that will shape a modern, flexible and dynamic people. Filipino is that desire, is that goal, is that longing to go beyond the cultural depravity that befell on the early Filipino people.

Second of all, Filipino and Tagalog cannot be compared to renaming English as British. Geez! Without being too pedantic, and at the risk of sounding brusque and callous, English lexicographically refers to the people, language, and culture of the inhabitants of England. British refers to a the people who inhabit Great Britain, an island composed of the nations of England, Wales and Scotland. British then is exclusively descriptive of a people, not a language, indeed, Wales have Welsh language and Scotland have Scottish Gaelic language. To equate Filipino and Tagalog as like renaming English as British smacks of intellectual laziness. At an age of technological proliferation, a modicum of academic credulity is but fitting and proper if one does not truly understand the implications of, not to mention the meaning of certain concepts. Plainly, such thinking is pure casuistry and sophistry masquerading as a legitimate intellectual certitude and is a clear manifestation that the very non-existence of a coherent national language as exemplified in Filipino and the so-called "Filipino youths" apparent aversion to such is an indication that the cultural hangover we had during three centuries of Spanish monastic rule and fifty years of American pop culture and pedantic brainwashing has ensured that we most likely will be a people hopelessly unsure of its essence, its direction, its goals and its dreams. Sad indeed and tragic at worst.