From: benign0@y...
Date: Sun Nov 5, 2000 11:43pm
Subject: Get Real Philippines! - take 2

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The only really interesting discussion thread on the eLagda forum involved the overwhelming response to the opinion of a handful of people who attempted to look beyond politics and into the very nature of the people who created this crisis. It is easy to lose site of the fact that we the Filipino people not only *elected* Erap, we *created* him. Whether we *voted* for him or not is irrelevant and not the issue. All of us – rich or poor, educated or uneducated – contributed to what we are now rallying against.

But before we go on along that line of thought, let's get one thing out of the way first. The eLagda forum is composed of people who have the resources to access the internet. For this simple fact, it is reasonable to postulate that this forum will never truly reflect the voice of the Filipino people. And having said that, we have narrowed down our universe to our kind's comfort zone. Our kind, to which citizens of this forum can be classified into, is whatever you want to call it – illustrado, bourgeoisie, heck, why not, "middle class" and up.

Let's analogise further. If we map out the family tree of the entire animal kingdom, we find that the elite fauna of the earth – the primates – makes up probably less than 1% of the total bio mass of the planet. So to an alien explorer's eyes, chimps, lemurs, and baboons would probably be indistinguishable from us humans taken in the perspective of this total spectrum of animalkind. In the same way, in the context of the entire Filipino population, Erap, Chavit Singson, the average SMS-addicted La Sallista (please pardon my example), as well as we netizens will be totally indistinguishable.

So why not get started with getting to know our own kind first before we fancy ourselves as experts on what makes the *real* Juan de la Cruz tick. We all benefited from the domestic help made accessible to us by the horribly low wages and lack of employment prospects across the archipelago. We honed our communication and debating skills on foreign textbooks (see how easier it is to express one's self in English than in the talasalitaan-infested vernacular?) for no such level of intellectual discourse that is found in this forum exists at convenient levels of availability in the Tagalog world. We create safe havens for our own pseudo-modern living by building fences around our subdivisions and posting armed guards around them (again, because they come cheap). In not so many examples (there are more), we have shown how we've, at the very least, allowed the rest of the country to decay before our very eyes.

Finally, we measure the level of our success as a social class by how far we've left the rest in the dust – to watch Eat Bulaga, speak with p's and f's defects, idolise meatheads like Bong Revilla and Robin Padilla, and, yes, vote for people like Erap.

Let's face it. Our kind is an entire universe removed from the average Filipino. And the extremeness of Erap's brand and quality of governance is merely a mutant reflection of the struggle within the hearts of all of us in the enlightened class. Therefore, to us, Erap is nothing more than a colossal embarrassment because he has exposed to the rest of the world what we really are. This source of motivation is a world of difference to what changing Erap would mean to the peasant farmer. But that's an entirely different story (and one that implies leanings that I don't adhere to either).

So, ok, fine, let's get rid of the man. If it were another time I could have said that the more interesting part of the story would be what happens next. But that story's already been told over the last 14 years.

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