By Manny Pinol
There is this story of a Filipino family who tried to impress a visitor by serving the only fish in the kitchen even when the hungry children wanted to have the grilled bangus for themselves.
The children were assured that the visitor will not be able to consume the whole fish and that one side of it will certainly be left for them.
As the children, who peeped through the holes of the wall separating the kitchen and the bedroom, saw the visitor turning over the fish to feast on the other side which was supposed to be reserved for them, they all howled in protest: “Nanay, gibali na ang isda!”
(Mother, he has turned the fish over.)
The Filipino’s misplaced hospitality, which to a certain degree borders on hypocrisy, is the bane to our development and existence as a nation.
When I was Governor, I was confronted with this reality where barangay officials had to literally beg for financial support to celebrate their village fiesta and where families raised pigs for one whole year which will be slaughtered during the town fiesta to be fed to visitors.
But worse than our misplaced hospitality is the penchant of the Filipino of put up a false face, especially when it involves highly popular issues.
Consider this: The Philippine media made a big issue out of the efforts of Vice President Jejomar Binay to travel to China to appeal for reprieve for the Filipina drug mule who has been executed by the Chinese authorities two days ago.
A Roman Catholic bishop even called on the faithful to pray for a miracle so that the Filipina drug mule would be saved from certain death.
But how do we reconcile these actions with the fact that we project drug dealers in the Philippines as the personification of the devil who destroys the lives of the Filipino youth?
How do we fit this with the tacit approval which almost every one of us expresses in hushed whispers every time a drug dealer is killed extra-judicially?
How do we explain our amusement to the joke that in Davao City, the Chinese New Year’s greetings of “Kung Hei Fat Choy” has been transformed to “Kung Choy Patyon” as drug dealers end up as stiff cadavers in the isolated areas of the city?
The other display of Filipino hypocrisy which gave me goose pimples all over my body was the case of Zamboanga city’s dog hero, Kabang, who reportedly lost its upper snout while saving two children.
Please do not misunderstand me. I love animals. I have goats, cats, dogs, chicken and at one time even pigs.
But the attention given to Kabang, who was brought to the US to undergo an operation to address the injury the dog suffered when it was hit by a motorcycle and who was later honored with the title Ambassador of Dogwill was the height of Filipino hypocrisy.
Did the people who were behind the supposed “humanitarian” effort to save the dog Kabang even realize that in North Cotabato and elsewhere in the country dozens of children have died because of the simple “dengue” and that one of the main reasons why these children died was because their parents could not afford to buy the blood needed for transfusion?
Are they even aware that many Filipino women in the countryside are suffering from myoma, toxic goiter and breast cancer?
Just like the outpouring of sympathy for Kabang, would they be willing to shoulder the expenses to be incurred by these hapless human beings in having the operation they need, not in the United States but only in Davao City?
Talking of saving a human life, why do we give such a big attention to the efforts to save a drug mule while nobody seems to care about the two sisters from Zamboanga who were abducted by the Abu Sayyaf in Sulu while doing a film documentary on the Sulu Sultanate?
This is our worst scourge as a nation, a cross that we all have to carry – a pandemic called national hypocrisy.
Unless we shed off this false face, the Filipino nation will continue to have a split personality and will forever struggle to establish an iconic identity as a people.
(Photo credit: This photo downloaded from The Huffington Post was taken by Bullit Marquez of Associated Press.)
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