Why are Filipinos not united?

Zarita Lopez

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Why are Filipinos not united?

As a political unit, the Philippines was entirely a FOREIGN CREATION.

Prior to the Spanish conquest and colonization of the Philippines, the Philippines was merely an archipelago occupied by different people who arrived at different times with different languages, cultures, and local religious traditions.

Given the 7,100+ Islands that make up the Philippines, politically and culturally the country was and remains ATOMIZED and FRAGMENTED.

The main social unit CONTINUES to be the FAMILY and, by extension, the CLAN. Rarely does this extend all the way to a sense of NATIONAL IDENTITY.

How do you know? Just look at the littered and dirty public areas. There’s no sense of a LARGER or more “united” sense of identity. Look at crime.

Regardless of what you look at, the Philippines is not “united” precisely because whatever political and economic systems were imposed on its people were done from a TOP DOWN and OUTSIDE IN approach.

How would a NATIONAL IDENTITY be forged? Ironically enough, when Pinoys EMIGRATE OUT that’s when they start sensing a national identity. Inside the Philippines they are Waray, Kapampangan, Illongo, Southern or Northern Ilocano, etc but outside, they are just FILIPINO.

But this sense of national identity is comparative and external in nature… it only applies to people outside the Phlippines.

What about inside the archipelago? Ironically, the solution may be FEDERALISM.

Only when localized language and culture groups feel they have “skin” in the game can they finally grow comfortable with the fact that there is such a thing as a “Philippines”

And no… Catholicism didn’t unite the Philippines because if you study how that religion is practiced here it becomes as clear as the noonday sun that the Spanish frailes just coopted preexisting superstition and animism and put “Christian” garb on these practices and passed it off as Catholicism.

Case in point, the prevalent saying of BAHALA NA. Everything you say that you’re invoking the name of one of the most powerful pre-Christian deities.

The Philippines will never be united until the material conditions for such unification fully exist. Local economic autonomy opens the door…