The Making of the Filipino

            I was waiting for the traffic light to turn red one rainy afternoon when two gorgeous European ladies came under my big umbrella seeking refuge from the heavy downpour. I was taken aback, naturally. At first, I was tongue-tied. This does not happen regularly, not even with my own race. Racist? When I got hold of myself from the momentary surprise, the red light was glaring implying the vehicles to stop and the humans to start walking. The two came with me across. To break the ice, I asked them where they are studying in the middle of the highway! I heard a resounding UST, and I thereupon felt their presence more familiarly. I told them I am a Philosophy major and what a reaction they showed! I came up with my theories.

Theory 1:         Philosophy is misconstrued as a purely intellectual endeavor; hence, it’s a waste to devote time to a course which in the end would just turn one into a teacher or something similar.

Theory 2:         Since Philosophy is a rationalistic approach to reality, it is impossible that a Filipino would engage in such an enterprise, implicitly implying the incompetence to involve oneself in such a transcendent body of knowledge.

At the moment, something holds me back to forego any of my conjectures. For during that fleeting 20 seconds or so, they met not only a co-student or a Philosophy student, but an aspect of a truly Filipino. I tweeted about this event and received comments in Facebook from some of my friends. Get their number. Address, too. I thought of that, even entertaining the thought of taking a picture with them. But reflecting back, I found it fateful that I did not. Let them come to know every Filipino they cross path with and discover in them what makes them such. Our common experience has given them a positive aspect of me. But generalization would leave them only disappointment. The challenge and the pressure, then, are not on them, but on us, who claim to be Filipinos. What makes us one? Who or what is the genuine Filipino? I will not dictate. Let’s discover together, not merely on the level of historical digging, but more productively, to create our own dignity which is in line with the beautiful ones of old.