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Webmaster's Note: Guillermo Gomez Rivera is a Premio Zobel awardee, a member of the Academia Filipina and former National Language Committee Secretary, Philippine Constitutional Convention 1971-73. Part
1: What is a ‘state’? 7. Was the Filipino State mortgaged and hocked? Was it gross betrayed? Will the Filipinos remain to be stateless even in their own country? Thus, because of the confusion wrought upon the national psyche of the Filipino people through the implacable requirement of the English language, ----over Tagalog-Filipino and Spanish---- the Filipino State has ended up being a virtually lost property to the Filipino people. The confusion and chaos wrought upon the Filipino language and compulsory English has somehow resulted in the virtual mortgage of the Filipino State to the U.S. WASP banks and to whatever they may deign dictate over the destiny of Filipinos. The solution to this betrayal could, perhaps, be the out-right rejection of the use of the English language on the part of a more respectable Filipino people,-------unless the U.S. government and people take in the Philippines as a State of their Union and assume all the debts, which they themselves did impose upon the Filipino State through slavish Filipino politicians in the first place. If the U.S. chooses not take in the Philippines as a State,----even as a Free Associate state like Puerto Rico----, the rejection of English must be immediately started by the Filipino people themselves to give way to their own national language as their tool of education, and real freedom and independence, (at least in language and culture) so that the Filipino State will at last acquire a better share of that attribute called "national sovereignty". The present ruin of the Philippine economy, and the doormat situation of the Filipino State, ----threatened as it is into becoming a narco-tate---, calls for a solution such as the one recommended even if our politicians may still remain as incurably pro-American at their own risk, of course. Filipinos in general have nothng to lose after all. Anyway, with compulsory English, it is only a few Filipino betrayers and scalawags who can get rich through corruption (i.e. political power) in order to somehow avoid the moral suffering, the actual poverty and the miserable penury imposed upon the majority. The rest of the Filipino people, as it is now seen and known, are simply being condemned to abject poverty, and stultifying ignorance due to the frequent miseries of over-expensive electricity, over expensive and scarce food, no medical attention, lack of potable water and a deadly environmental destruction through pollution. In the end, the majority of Filipinos must ask themselves what economic relief, what social benefit can they really get from talking in a mostly fractured English now known as Taglish? Employment as over-sea domestic maids, drivers, entertainers, prostitutes, ----including the child and male varieties? This degradation upon which the ordinary Filipino job-seeker is forced into, has even turned the name 'Filipino' and 'Filipina' to mean 'domestic help' or servant in the English language. Is this the reserved place for Filipinos in the English speaking world? Can the Filipino people ever recover the national honor they once had when they were still a predominantly Spanish-speaking people? Or, will Filipinos need to become totally Chinese in order to recover some honor for themselves? In time, will Filipinos ever be able to recover their State from its U.S. WASP mortgagees that come as foreign banks and neocolonizing impositions and conditions? Or, will Filipinos just go on being stateless even in their own country because economically marginalized through a whimsical globalization in un-phonetic English? RELATED: 17 September 2001 |
The
Filipino State
