Some of my best thinking comes at three o'clock in the morning when my blog-writing begins. I think that is because Philippine culture is so much like a dream-world, filled with illogic and frustration, like running in slow motion. So I just morph from a dream to the reality and start writing. Usually the writing is attached to laughter, for the alternative is tears. And I think Kafka is essentially very funny, except for the tragedy part of it.
The other day, I imagined the Philippines as a bunch of amoebae in a petri dish, with all the hyperactive amoebae blobbing this way and that but unable to find a way out of the petri dish, which itself is made of some unbreakable polymer that cages the creatures in the stew of their own making.
It is this lack of a way out that is the distinctive aspect of this culture. Not the jeepneys or fiestas or murders or pollution or corruption.
It is the failure to correct society's flaws. The failures to correct the way Filipinos damage Filipinos.
The Philippines is a huge mass of moving inertia, breaking all of Newton's and Einstein's thinking about mass, velocity, time and space.
Filipinos in their conglomerate social state lack a forward vision translated into a plan translated into progressive action. I dunno if it is too much work or what. I see it in my wife's brother. Essentially smart, essentially inert, with no idea about such things as responsibility or working hard. He'd rather just hang out at the basketball court, and, alas, his new “pals” have introduced him to the tuba klatch. Career is not a relevant term around the tuba table.
That, to me, is Philippine society in a micro-micro state. No concept of progress or personal ambition. Just subsist.
What you have here is a bad case of moving inertia and I have zero idea what to do about it.
Until a Filipino sets up sail, the boat goes nowhere.
Amoebic ye rise, amoebic ye flail.
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