Home > Op-ed > PATHLESS TRAVELS > May 16, 2004 | To bottom

Mental colony

I will make this piece short and sweet, like the title above.

We in the nationalist and progressive movement have, for many decades now, tried to identify, criticize, and reject imperialist impositions in all walks of our national life – from the most crucial issues of control over land and resources, investment policies, presence of foreign troops and military bases, to the vestiges of colonial influence in our educational system and culture.

I won’t start a long treatise on how successful (or unsuccessful) we have been in resisting such imperialist impositions. I will merely reflect on a few random observations that don’t necessarily bring a more profound understanding of our anti-imperialist advocacy.

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Note #1 Young street protestors are very fond of shouting these catchy slogans and chants as they march around town, or to give their rally programs some pep and vigor. I’m definitely not chiding them. I’ve been a most enthusiastic shouter myself, in my own youthful 1970’s street-fighting days. It’s an exhilarating experience to start a chant as you march, and hear the proper response reverberate down the whole stretch of the avenue filled with protestors.

But I wonder how many young activists realize that the basic format of many of the protest chants being used now is a takeoff from US Army and US Marine marching chants. It appears that even in our rejection of US imperialist dictates, we sometimes have no choice but to use at least some of their more adaptable weapons against them. Or do we really have no choice?

Wanted: more anti-imperialist chants modeled after the salidummay, or the uggayam, or the ambahan.

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Note #2. A year or two ago, the workers of Nestle Philippines and their supporters belonging to various union rights advocates launched a boycott campaign against all Nestle products, to protest the extremely anti-worker policies of the company. Many people took the campaign very seriously, and some even went so far as to research all kinds of products manufactured by Nestle, whether within the country or not, that ultimately reach store shelves and kitchen cabinets.

It turns out, Nestle has its many-tentacled fingers in all kinds of pie, so to speak, such that even the most conscientious boycotter will have to make some very painful decisions in foregoing a favorite drink, confectionary, dairy product, or other packaged food, when s/he reads the fine print in the label and discovers that Nestle had a hand in its processing or packaging.

And if Nestle deserves such painstaking research, why should we not apply the same effort to other products of other multinational labor exploiters? What about Unilever? Or Shell? Or Toyota? If we come right down to it, such an extensive boycott-MNC campaign would entail nothing less than a sweeping lifestyle change. Are we up to it?

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Note #3. We Filipinos all know, deep down inside, that our electoral system sucks. “Mega-sucks, nega talaga” in the words of my teenage son and his friends. And yet, each time we wrap up another election, many of us barely raise our voices above whispering level to protest against the electoral fraud and violence that our communities suffered – unless it is our candidate that is losing.

Some of us even nod in silent agreement when the winning candidates say, “Let us stop the bickering, the people have spoken, we need unity, let the healing begin.” It was as if we are afraid that if we push too much on the “fraud and violence” theme, we will again release the unpredictable Genie of People Power, and God knows who will be struck down, who will be swept to power this time. So we fall silent.

That is, until some foreign observers or foreign media tell us like it is. It was as if many of us still needed a magic foreign-made mirror to tell us that we have such a dirty face, before we are truly convinced that we need to wash it. In the case of the recent May 10 elections, two separate international missions reached roughly the same conclusions. One mission was rather quiet, the other mission very vocal about the fraud and violence. We are thankful that they saw our dirty face, and told us unflinchingly that we need to clean it up.

But looking back, the public should have reached the same conclusions long ago, whether or not there were foreign observers who were objective enough.

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Enough with the rambling. The point is this: We should quite candidly accept that strong vestiges of colonial mentality still exert their influence inside our collective head as a nation, inside our individual heads as Filipinos. There’s a “mental colony” thriving in each of us, so to speak.

Since we cannot possibly excise this “mental colony” from our minds once and for all – that would be nothing short of frontal lobotomy – we should at least learn to deal with it from a consistent nationalist and progressive standpoint.

We should strive to assimilate whatever is positive in that “mental colony” – the cream of the crop of Western science, technology and culture, for example – and eliminate whatever is disruptive of our own national and social system.

Thus, each time I decide to drink Coke (I do, maybe a couple of times a month), I remind myself: “I should be drinking more calamansi juice, more samalamig. There must be a way for a local, non-multinational company to produce calamansi drinks and samalamigs in more convenient packs. We really need a government that can truly implement a program of nationalist, self-reliant industrialization.”

But, in the meantime, the inviting cold glass of Coke stands there, exactly how the ads portray it. The rhythm is just too primal to resist: “Ito ang beat, sabay-sabay. Huwag mag-mimiss, walang sablay.” Elalay, salidummay. To resist or not. Every day, every hour. That is the question. #