I ugly-cried today. It was that obnoxious, uncontrollable kind of bawling that went on for about 2 minutes. It was weird and cathartic and so loud and sudden that my two startled dogs looked at me curiously while I was staring at my phone, taking a crap. Even I was taken aback. What’s even stranger is it’s not because I found out about someone’s passing or anything as valid as that. It was because of a Facebook video, of a certain 4’11” teenager named Carlos Yulo who made Philippine history and won Gold at the World Gymnastics Championships that day. When he stood on the podium and started mouthing the lyrics of the Philippine National Anthem, that’s the exact timestamp when the tears began to flow involuntarily.
There’s only one explanation to what just happened. I am that desperate to find something — anything — to be proud of for being a Filipino. Because frankly, and I often feel so guilty for this, I always feel that there’s no actual reason left.
The Philippines just cut the budgets for The Department of Education, Commission on Higher Education, and Department of Health, among many others, and allocated it for Intelligence and Confidential funds of the office of the President. Dengue and measles outbreaks are declared in the country, while polio — a disease that was gone for 19 years — returns with a vengeance. A self-proclaimed ‘intelligent’ senator is questioning the Department of Agriculture’s ‘crazy obsession’ for corn research — corn being the country’s second most important crop. Philippine public transportation is an everyday five-hour trip through hell and back while our President and his associates ride a 2-Billion Peso jet plane. “Superman Is the Only Thing That Can Solve the Philippines’ Traffic Problem” and “Hazing Is Necessary To Turn People Into Warriors” sound like titles of Reddit jokes but are actual statements from actual Filipino Senators. Pork barrel is being pushed once again by these unbelievable jerks, amounting to a total of 29.9 Billion Pesos for 299 members of the House. Speaking of corruption, the anti-graft court junked a 1 Billion peso civil case against the Marcoses for ‘lack of evidence’, and therefore proved the family innocent, as if the countless human rights violations including the Archimedes Trajano case during Martial Law, and the 10 Billion dollar estimate total of their ill-gotten wealth are not evidence enough. Hell, if you are on the Guinness Book of World records under the Greatest Robbery of a Government category, then that should be evidence enough right? And I can’t fucking stand the presidential spokesperson’s lizard-face while it, together with his daily statements with varying degrees of idiocy, are plastered all over my personal social feeds each morning.
And this is why I ugly-cried this morning.
While I felt so proud to be Filipino at that very moment when Carlos Yulo pulled up and showed everyone the small flag on his shirt, in the current sad sorry state that my country is in, I can never truly be.
