7 Literally means “without a care”
Of course, behavioral scientists will have a different view of this. An intellectual may look at these things quite disparately from a common Filipino construction worker in Saudi Arabia. The former would have a succinct discourse on such issues, drawing on conceptual and historical perspectives as practiced and developed by the so-called early great civilizations, as argued and perused by Greek philosophers down to the great contemporary thinkers. On the other hand, the latter would have such an ambiguous notion such that, most often, he can only account for his worries of the family that he is feeding back home, but his act is just as deep as the one who understands the concept of nationhood. Clearly, his concept of nationhood, or being Filipino, begins and ends in his family’s struggle, and just being responsible to his family is enough responsibility towards the country. But just the same, the intellectual is also struggling to understand the concept no matter how articulate he is or how eloquent he may be on the issue; a clear perspective on the issue is not measured by a succinct discourse and argumentation. A punk rocker’s ranting could be deeper than the polemics of a demagogue. Nobody has a monopoly of the so-called love of country. Fixation is acquired through experience. Displacement could permeate a vicious injury to the psyche and unfortunately, the Filipino has been inflicted and is afflicted by that injury, an injury that is very physical and psychological; the proletarian Filipino and the bourgeois Filipino have had this injury, without exception, but again on different levels, particularly economically, sociologically, and politically. We have a very long history of displacement. Or rephrasing that: our history, recorded and unrecorded, is a history of displacements. The Filipino culture is replete with displacements, oftentimes directly caused by some of our most common traits. I’ll cite a concrete Filipino trait which effected so much displacement—that of being too embracing of encroachments/trespasses/invasions. We are too embracing, too soft and too trusting of visitors or intruders; the classic ‘Filipino hospitality,’ they call it. Our cultural landscape is quite unique in this regard. We open our arms and before we know it, we are being colonized and abused. We have had to endure all of this quite passively. Why are we so open to intruders? Why are we so trusting? The archipelagic setup might have had an effect on this as argued by some quarters; the scattering of so many islands offers and creates openness. Or others say it’s the tropical weather, the perennial humidity, which encourages perpetual retirements so that whoever comes can just come in; there are no checkpoints, no so-called rigid entry points where a new arrival can be stopped and checked on his tracks? Welcome, find your place in the sand! Or could the walang pakialam 7 attitude be the rationale for this? And where did we get this walang pakialam attitude? I think there is some truth to the belief that early Filipino Malays had so much—food, gold, vegetation, beaches, and they are so beautiful and gentle that they couldn’t care so much about encroachments. Such conditions made them lazy and apathetic and really giving to a fault. Pigafetta, the Spanish diarist/chronicler of the Ferdinand Magellan voyage cited such abundance and beauty of our land and people. In one of his entries, he said about the palm trees: “It could feed a family for a hundred years.” There were early pocket resistances, of course; this eventually happened when the abuses or seeming disrespect to ‘natives’ became intolerable. The first recorded resistance was Datu Lapu Lapu’s rejection and eventual butchery of the circumnavigator Ferdinand 32
Magellan. Check Pigafetta’s gory details on this. Gory, man, gory. Before that, some Filipino tribes (the Tausugs of Sulu and Zamboanga, the Maguindanaoans of Cotabato, the Maranaos of Lanao, the Badjaos of Mindanao seas, some Tagalog tribes of Maynila and some Kapampangans of Tarlac) had already been conquered by Islamist Arabs. Weeks before the Mactan debacle, Magellan, fresh from an easy conversion of Datu Humabon of Homonhon, had been converting the Cebuanos with the ease of drinking tuba (palm wine) and leisurely lying on a white sand beach waiting for a sunset to hide all the rotting fruits and roasted boars and fish, leftovers of endless festivities; Pigafetta even relayed rampant orgies with beautiful Cebuanas as part of their all too easy conquest of our islas. The women, as insinuated by Pigafetta, were regular gifts from the datus. Pigafetta’s journals were cloaked with sexism and racism and were really bewildering, especially when he kept invoking his faith on some saints and miracles and the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ and God while describing the Cebuana and other Malay women in almost pornographic detail—the skin, the smell, the giggles, the breath, the sensuality of it all; Caligula’s romps on flesh would look dull. Man, who can blame the asshole. The archipelago was just too Freudian of a paradise then. It took us more than three hundred years to realize that we needed to be free from this demeaning encroachment. By then, the damage had been all too telling on our psyche—we’ve become so Vatican and halfbaked Castilian. It was a major displacement, a cultural debacle. Then, Roosevelt and the Americans came with their “white man’s burden” credo, and again, they got us so easily. At the cost of twenty million pesos, and a grand mock Manila Bay battle to boot, they trampled on us for the whole of the 20th century. There was the bloody hidden war, of course, that killed almost a million Filipinos; it was the Americans’ first Vietnam, and, man, until now, they don’t want to talk about this and they are still controlling us—politically and economically. That was another major displacement. World War II was another one. It was all too brief, but all too bloody. And then, the other Ferdinand, the very charismatic Marcos led us down the scorching river Styx for twenty-one long and agonizing years. The dark Martial Law period caused a monumental displacement to our psyche. The period institutionalized everything that is so wrong with our system and our culture now. These displacements have so effectively affected us—from the body politic down to the individual Filipino. And, ultimately, one major effect is the phenomenon of Filipino migration to other shores. The interminability of this sociological phenomenon is more profoundly equated to poverty than to other causes like political asylum, education, artistic pursuits, intermarriages (a big percentage of which is also economically-based) and/or simply, a form of escape. For the poor Filipino, the only escape is the proverbial greener pastures offered by western cultures. Poverty sums up all these displacements, not just economically, but in every aspect of the Filipino’s socio-cultural landscape.. And to go back to your question: why do we have such an affinity to the motherland? Why? I believe that the very core of our connectedness is awa, translated in Anglo as pity, sympathy, compassion. Every Filipino who lives or who’s been in other shores for quite a while is wont to express this. I call this the Pinoy pathos. They would always feel so sorry for the sorry state of the country, for the majority of Filipinos reeling in marginalized conditions in the islands. They’d always express 33