Why Filipinos are hopeful

If there’s one trait that Filipinos are hopelessly stuck with, it is being hopeful.

By stating this, I am not simply projecting a severe case of sentimentalism, typical of overseas Filipinos ensconced in their First World comfort zones who are either out of touch with reality or are desperate to ease their guilt of jumping ship.

The results of an annual survey conducted by Social Weather Stations (SWS) this year showed that 90 percent of Filipinos expressed hope as they greeted the new year. This was 5 points lower than last year, but still higher than, say, in Germany where the Allensbach Institute of Demoskopy pioneered this poll in 1991 but where the score has averaged only 47 percent ever since.

What are Filipinos so hopeful about? From a myriad of reasons, both incidental and deep-rooted, time-bound and long-run, allow me to cite a few. Foremost of all, 2004 is election year! And ironically, it’s not even because of the promise of change! Mind you, if FPJ’s opinion poll lead throws you into a fit of despair, you probably belong to the burgis minority of 10 percent. After all, nothing promises more thrill for the Pinoy in the street than a carnival, and politics, being its rowdier version, certainly triggers giddying expectancy. If the filing of candidacy is a foretaste of the oncoming circus, the crescendo up to May 2004 could only build action-packed suspense. It helps that the parade to the presidency has never been so colorfully star-studded, with the high-flying tandems of Gloria Arroyo-Noli de Castro and FPJLoren Legarda leading the pack to boggle pollsters this early in the contest.

Filipinos, 20 percent of whom want to follow the 7 million of us already out of the country, are hopeful that they could finally make the exit this year. Only jaded expats like us think that such a psychological profile paints a picture of despair rather than hope. Filipinos have a sharp eye for the silver lining and see glimmers of hope everywhere, except home—in the US, where the holiday consumption-led upswing could stretch through 2004 to generate more jobs for them; in Japan, where the lowering of age requirement for entertainers will open employment opportunities for the younger virgins at home; in Iraq and Afghanistan, where mine-clearing and reconstruction will spur a demand for engineers; in terrorstricken Israel and Saudi Arabia, where increasing casualties of bomb explosions will spawn demand for doctors and nurses. For the Pinoy, the more overcast the horizon, the brighter the silver lining. After all, the more foreboding and forbidding the destination, the more unrivalled chances a Pinoy gets to finally bid home goodbye.

This may be a cliché, but Pinoys are hopelessly hopeful because they have a lot of spirituality in them. It’s not so much Christian but Bathala spirituality—the kind that spawns a bahala na attitude in life. Christian hope is premised on God’s sovereignty in our lives—that the God of grace will provide, protect and grant favor unto those who seek His will and live their lives accordingly. But the Bathala hope is premised on the assumption that life is governed by the mettlesome animist god whose temperament invariably produces only two outcomes, win or lose, panalo o talo, each having a 50-50 percent chance of materializing. Since Bathala does not really care about our virtues, Filipinos mirthfully say at every turn, bahala na. Such a spiritual disposition makes for a surprisingly carefree, cheerful and hopeful character. If life’s a game of chance with only two outcomes, we can dance ourselves into tomorrow and into the new year, regardless of today. That’s also why we are a race of gamblers, from the lowliest day laborers to our supreme leaders. Name any game of chance—sabong, masiao, mahjong, tongits, sakla, jueteng—we have it. Bathala’s stroke of fate may be unpredictable, and yet he is
fair, like our just Christian God, because his job is to spin the gulong ng kapalaran (wheel of fate), much like a game-show host. If our anito’s memory lapses and forgets our turn up, we can always ask balato from the winning mortal. Wonder why Filipinos still hummed their way to the bank when everyone else in Asia ran out of dollars in 1997? The 7 million OFW winners never forget their duty to send balato to the 70 million losers back home, and that’s a whopping US $8 billion every year. Up or down, Filipinos have no tear to spare. They always brim with hope.

Finally, and I believe this carries the most weight, Filipinos are hopeful because of the resilience of his spirit. Franco Varona, Jr., a Filipino-Canadian college student from Vancouver, wrote that in his two-and-a-half year stay in the Philippines, he was impressed by the "glint of hope" in the faces of poor Filipinos that he never saw in the more prosperous place he grew up in. Atypical of expats who are either jaded with cynicism if they are old enough to have lived under at least two Filipino presidents or spoiled brats if they lived all their life overseas, Franco expressed hope that the Philippines could experience a renaissance if the young ones return to help. I believe that the hope he saw in the faces of bedraggled Filipinos was no illusion. It is hope that springs from the Filipino’s deep reservoir of goodwill towards life. Lola’s most enduring heirloom is the wisdom, “Habang may buhay, may pag-asa” (There’s hope as long as we live). Used to living in the typhoon path, Filipinos are used to life’s natural cycle of building and rebuilding, falling and recovering, emptying and refilling. Filipinos can traverse life’s extreme ends and not despair. They can live with what they have, merrily, because they know what it’s like to have nothing. They know that the downside is not the final turn in the endless spin of life. The Filipino spirit accommodates to every situation in life, that is why he can live in London or in Sierra Leone. In diverse environs removed from home, where the system nourishes and rewards his talents and gives him a fair stake in society, he shines. The Filipino spirit is always open to second chances, for him and for others. Under enlightened leadership, he can open himself up to life’s infinite possibilities through discipline and virtue. The resilience of the Filipino spirit is his key to a real breakthrough in life that can make his hope a reality.