First and foremost, like most of the rest of the educated and cultured societies, Filipinos have seen the horrendous, tragic and brutal experience of the thousands of refugees fleeing their country's seemingly endless descent into oblivion - the Syrian civil war is now on its fourth year and shows no signs of abating. This has inevitably led to one of the worst mass migrations since the end of World War II. The initial lukewarm response of Europe to the influx of the refugees were somehow punctuated by episodes of relief when ordinary citizens across the Eurozone showed their support for the refugees' plight.
Many Filipinos in the social media have been posting messages in various platforms about how the Philippines could somehow help the refugees. Without doubt, typical of Filipino's innate emotional temperament, no less coupled by a culture that puts a premium on pity as a national past time. Indeed, in recent surveys, it has become inescapably clear that Filipinos are the most emotional people on earth today!
I understand my countrymen's views on such matter. I also understand that decisions done and made at the height of emotional upheavals and highs, however they may look, always end up poorly in the end.
Take the case of the Rohingya, hosting them would seem superficially to be the most reasonable course. These are lives we are talking about, as they say. Our shared humanity impels us to help them with all that we can. They too, are humans. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera ad infinitum....
What behooves to all those who are in favor of blindly hosting refugees is that after the media hypes fades in the background, the real task is just beginning. For one, the refugees will have to be fed, housed, afforded medical, dental and economic support. Over the long term, they will eventually have to be given access to education, even jobs.
Can the Philippines really afford all this? Can the Philippines handle all this?
I am a survivor of Supertyphoon Yolanda, and has history has shown, the government's less than stellar handling of the situation - dare I say much, much, much worse than the aftermath of the typhoon itself showed that as a society - WE HAVE A LOT TO FIX, A LOT TO LEARN, AND MOST OF ALL, WE HAVE TO LEARN TO PRIORITIZE!!!
Those who insist that our humanity impels us to help others in need is living in a world of make-believe, a delusion of ersatz humanitarianism and symptomatic of hypocritical religiosity, so prevalent, so widespread, so palpably common in our country today. How can we say we can help others when we can barely provide for our own people - much less plan for the needs and what ifs of the situation we are in when disasters arrive, which is by the way on a regular basis.
We don't need additional mouths to feed when we can barely feed the now astounding 100 million Filipino bodies we have. I cannot understand where the government, and the ordinary Filipinos who actually support the idea that we have to host refugees as a compelling imperative of our historical experience. Geez! That is pure non-sense.
We have catered to other races at the expense of providing a decent, respectable and yes, humane service to our own people. We are concerned about the Rohingya, who were rejected by their fellow Muslim Malaysia and Indonesia and even more rejected by its prosperous easterly neighbor Thailand. What does it say about us?
For some it says that Filipinos are kinder, more humanitarian, more attuned to others' needs. Haha, funny because we have never been adequately attuned to the plight of the millions of our fellow Filipinos languishing in jails because of a poorly managed legal system, or who cannot get timely, sufficient and adequate aid during natural disasters because the agency tasked with helping those in need is shortchanging foreign aid given, or that millions of Filipino children are left on the streets all across this archipelago to fend for themselves. Ironic indeed, ironic that it pains me to see how such blind displays of superficial humanitarianism can afford some to declare on the internet that "they are proud to host refugees although coming from a country that is itself poor, marginalized, chaotic, barely keeping itself afloat and whose economy is essentially kept solvent by the Filipino diaspora working their ass out in foreign soil to eke out a decent future for their children here in the Philippines." It's painful because such hypocrisy abounds in the aristocracy of this nation, in the halls of the power elite, in the closeted academia of the Philippines' intellectual elite.
Sheltered from the tragedy unfolding in our midst, we have continued to show concern to others while at the same time neglecting the same concern to our own people - those old men and women rummaging the streets of cities across the Philippines because they have been abandoned by their families, those young women sold to prostitution to make ends meet for their families, those who die slowly along our bridges, esteros, kalyes because our social services can only handle so much.
YES, this is what is so mind-boggling about my nation, its like watching a Picasso painting, schizophrenic in its field of vision, outwardly admirable acts shown to mask the fundamental problems conveniently ignored. Where the outward religiosity of the populace is matched only by the rapacious greed of its political elite, where the ordinary folks pretend to vote for candidates who pretend to serve, where the religious power of the various churches are shamelessly shoved to fulfill its own vested interests, where education in the English language is seen as the epitome of intellectual development, where progress is measured by the amount of household appliances, where agricultural products in a predominantly agricultural country are actually expensive and at times, prohibitively so.
What have we become as a people? What is happening to the Philippines? What is happening to our collective consciousness?
Are we becoming mere zombies lost in this world?
Welcome refugees to the Philippines - make yourself at home. And to our own internal refugees displaced by the incessant wars in Mindanao, welcome too.
