When we think of our home­land and what is going on, we are sometimes filled with pangs of anguish verging on despair. Anything could trigger the emotions. News of kababayans being ex­ecuted in foreign lands or dying in sickness away from their love ones. Or a chance conversation with a newly arrived kababayan and why he’s back after trying to stay in the Philippines after a decade in Canada. And most heart-rending of all - an emotional conversation with a caregiver who could not bury her father in the Philip­pines because the laws of this country makes it risky for her to leave and re-enter without the proper document.

True Patriot Love
Reading Michael Ignatieff’s ‘True Patriot Love’ makes one think of what makes a country. As most of you know, Ignatieff is the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. He was a private citizen when he started writing the book in 2000. Today, he wants to be Prime Minister. What he wrote makes me think about the Philippines and those of us who left it.

Excerpts:
“Love of country, being imag­ined, is not a natural feeling like hunger. Human beings invented the complex emotions we feel for nations only in the eighteenth century. What we can imagine we can forget. What we dream we can lose. Countries, being hu­man creations, can experience both birth and death.

A country begins to die when people think life is elsewhere and begin to leave. It begins to die when order disintegrates, when people cease to trust their fellow citizens or their government. In a country that is truly alive, the laws hold us in obedience, not just through fear of punishment but also through attachment to the values and traditions the laws protect. If this attachment wanes, if obedience is reduced to fear, ei­ther chaos or tyranny beckons.

We never love a country just for what it is. We love it for what it might yet become. The same is true for the love we bear our­selves. Love is always rooted in hope.”
Indeed, we are inclined to be­lieve that the Philippines is a ‘dy­ing’ country as millions of its citi­zens leave to find life elsewhere. If we no longer have an attachment to it, then the country is in chaos and tyranny thrives as what is happening now.

But as Ignatieff writes, we can still have hope. He says one should not love a country just for what it is, but what it might become. The problem is, it would be difficult to find something in the country to love – what of its rotten corruption, from civic officials to the military. We are confronted with daily news of charges being investi­gated but it seems nobody goes to jail! Therein lies the dilemma. Can we still dream of a Philip­pines that is truly free and fit to return to?

Comments: tedalcuitas@gmail.com

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