Colonial makeover
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EVERY JOURNEY ENDS AT THE BEGINNING
SAY WHAT?
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Do you live inside cave that somehow has internet access? Nice try with the picture, but you’re obviously grasping at straws. It’s not as if Filipinos have the patent on imitation. Everybody wants what they don’t have. Americans want the indios’ tanned skin, so they make a business of tanning products. Filipinos want white skins so we’ve made an industry of whitening products. It goes both ways kid.
nice try?…. i think you’re the one who lives in the cave “RYAN”. The Message is about colonization of the Philippines, ” It seems you are in favor of that” the truth is that colonization is WRONG. Because we’re not being true our to country and to ourselves. I Guess you arethe type of guy who wants to be a WHITE BOY in every way.
I hope you’re trying to be funny. I really, really hope you’re trying to be funny, because honestly, you just sound like you slept through your Philippine history classes.
I agree with Ryan when he says it’s a two-way street. I disagree with you when you say that it was the Americans who started this Philippine obsession with anything and everything Western.
According to Sinibaldo de Mas, a 19th century Spanish (Yes! Spanish! Who knew???) writer, “to break the pride of the Filipinos was a necessity.”
They did, by forcing on the Philippines Catholicism and a Spanish government, getting Filipinos to wear Spanish clothing and conform to Spanish cultural ideals. Things like the barong tagalog was, if you knew any better, something meant to differentiate between the Spaniards and the natives. It’s sheer so the latter couldn’t conceal any weapons. It has no pockets because, let’s face it amigos, the ~natives~ didn’t have any money to carry around anyway.
But I digress. So let’s move on to my bottom line: if you’re going to attempt to make provocative statements (and “attempt” is the operative word), do even a little bit of homework that goes beyond finding a pretty picture you want to put up on Dear Bloggie. You’ll be doing your readers and yourself a favor.
OMG EMILY you’re so RIGHT! I do want to be a WHITE BOY! Oh god, thank you, thank you so MUCH for bringing me to the LIGHT! I’m going to donate all my clothes to charity now and wear a BAHAG and hunt and forage for food like our ancestors DID, and woe to FOREIGNERS who decide to invade our country! I hunt them down with my BOLO and my YOYO!
*”EMILY”
RIGHT Ryan! Naka-shades, nag-iinternet at nag-iingles man daw ang matsing, matsing pa rin! WHITEWASH…
The picture tells it what it is – we were looked down as barbarians, uncivilized, and they made fun of our way of life in a most demeaning way. They make it appear that it is only through them that we will ever prosper. The mockery insults us to the core. This explains much how we are today and what we are today. some readers refuse to see the obvious. Time to take the shades off, Am-boy. Trust me, you’ll see better.
1. Ryan’s comment doesn’t even have anything to do with whether or not colonization is good or bad so I don’t know why you all have your panties in a twist. He’s just saying that people from different cultures copy each other, and that’s a fact of life that can be verified by simple observation. There isn’t any culture in the world that is “pure” and completely devoid of foreign influence. Why does that upset you so much? How does pointing out that simple fact that make him a wannabe white boy?
2. To say without qualification that colonization is bad betrays a terribly myopic perspective. You guys are the ones who need to go back to school to acquire a more nuanced understanding of colonization. I’m not saying that there were no negative effects, but to focus on the negative and to completely disregard the positive is unjust.
By the way if you really, really hate AMERICANS, you should get off the internets, because you know DARPA developed it to spy on people. You do know that don’t you?
1. Aissa, I have a better one…why does the picture upset Ryan (and you and gaby) so much? Not one of you had anything bad to say about the US colonizatiobn. But you have a mouthful to defend it. You sound more like a mouthpiece of the US embassy. and I don’t have panties.
2. Nobody said he should go back to school (in your class?). But of course we should focus on the negative, because that is were the problem is. That is the issue at hand, not the positive. Any attempt to do otherwise is to becloud the whole issue of our neo-colonial status. Now that is unjust.
Emer – I’m not upset by the picture. I’m upset by narrow minds who jump to conclusions. And it’s precisely because people (e.g. you lot) refuse to see the big picture by focusing on a small aspect of it that they come to faulty to conclusions. Branding us as “pro-American” or whatever doesn’t really help strengthen your point and it doesn’t serve as a counter argument to Ryan’s or mine. Oh, and yes, the comment about going back to school was from another post. I’m apologize, all the rabid and shortsighted ubernationalist comments on this blog are starting to sound the same to me.
I have SEEN the LIGHT! My mind is now UNCLOUDED! As opposed to BECLOUDED!
But to be serious. The picture didn’t upset me. The half-assed attempt by Mr. Banaag to associate colonization with imitation annoyed me. My point was simply this. People always feel that the grass is greener on the other side. This is why whites want to get tanned and why brown folks want to get white. I never once mentioned colonization because in case you didn’t notice, that wasn’t the point of his post.
But if you want to talk colonization, let’s. Colonization, like many things, has its pros and cons. Yes, it may have robbed us of a chance to build a unifying cultural identity, we may have been abused by the Spanish and US colonizers and forced into accepting a religion that to this day limits our potential by insisting that we use natural family planning methods and is revolted at the idea of population control.
However, The colonizers brought many things that we take for granted. They instituted public schools, established laws, improved infrastructure, and created (at least in part) a unified Filipino people. Our National hero was educated by our colonizers, and so were many of the heroes of the Katipunan and revolutions before that. There is also the simple truth that had we not been colonised, it would have taken us far longer to reach the level we are at today. You may long for that kind of cultural purity, but keep in mind that the ideas you have right now, the education you have gotten, and the information you readily have access to via the internet may not have been available to you in an alternate world where we were never colonized.
Lastly on negatives and positives. To focus extremely on either end is not the solution. Uberpositives fool themselves into thinking that there is absolutely nothing wrong with society. Ubernegatives fool themselves into thinking that we’re in such a big hole that only a massive upheaval of society is the answer to all the world’s ills. No one is saying we shouldn’t focus on the negative, but simply identifying the negative is not the solution. You can’t point at the problems of the country and act like your job as a citizen is done. If you really care about this country, as I’m sure many of you do, the solution lies in finding a negative, then thinking about or finding a positive solution to that negative, then acting on it. Contribute to a volunteer groups like Habitat for humanity or Gawad Kalinga, or support a poor child’s education through worldvision. In that way you can help bring about the Philippines that everyone knows it can be.
I don’t think there’s a need to reiterate points discussed by the previous two commenters. But I can. So I will.
Colonization = has both positive and negative aspects. My problem? The poster (as in “a person who posts”, not “a piece of image-based paraphernalia”) has consistently focused on the cons of colonization (often seeming like he’s looking through a very blurry proverbial lens), disregarding the contrasting side that’s brought about good things like paella, something which, when properly done, I personally think deserves a spot right up there with the public education and sewage systems.
My problem isn’t with this post. It’s with the badly-written text accompanying it and the inaccurate message that text carries.
If this was a joke, fine, I’ll let out a little chuckle if that makes you happy, but like I said, the poster (again, the person), has been nothing but toxic regarding Philippine culture, often to the point of sounding like a hypocrite. It seems off, his completely lambasting the Westernization of the Philippines -something we just can’t do anything to prevent- while confessing to a love for the foreign. It’s difficult for me to get my head around ~that~.
Seriously, people. We were colonized. It happened. We have the cathedrals and the statues and the battlements to prove it, along with a lot of things that are, in fact, pretty great (see: literature, food, the arts). If you’re all so pissed at the Western Hemisphere, I hear you can get a pretty decent loincloth from Minesview Park for a couple hundred pesos. Maybe you should look into that. Also, I recommend you burn every book by a Western author you own, pull every piece of denim (American) from your closet, delete every single U2 (Irish) song off your iPod (again, American) and swear off watching Penelope Cruz for the rest of your life.
Can’t? Think these things are too wonderful to live without , or that they’re too tied in to who you are?
Yeah. My point exactly.
And on the off chance that anyone thinks I would even remotely use an emoticon in that post: I did NOT mean that smiley.
W.O.W u rock for those ppol who opposes those people whose point of view is 98.8 percent wrong and the rest of it is right but no matter what LOVE YOUR own COUNTRY that’s it we cant do anything about the past but we can sure do something today(not in the future cause you cant do anything in the future if wont do it today!!)
Fabulous information! I will need it when I plan my wedding (which is in November this year!)
the picture explains the colonization of the Americans to the Philippines. before and after. that’s all i can come up with.