We Have Become Untrue to Ourselves

With all in all the force and vigor at my command, I contend that we keep up relaxed our vigilance, that we induct allowed ourselves to deteriorate. I contend that we have lost our ostentation in the Philippines, that we no longer conceive it a privilege and an honor to be born a Filipino. To the Filipino youth, slide fastener Filipino is good equal every more. Even their Filipino names no longer suit them. A male child named Juan does not c ar to be called Juanito anymore. No, he essential be Johnny. A miss named Virginia would get sore if she was nicknamed Viring or Binang. No, she must be Virgie or Ginny.Roberto has wrench Bobbie Maria, bloody shame or Marie. And because they have become so Americanized, because they look down on everything Filipino, they at one time regard with contempt all the things that our fathers and our fathers fathers held dear. They frown on kissing the hands of their elders, adage that it is unsanitary. They dont c be for the Angelus, re flection that it is old-fashioned. They belittle the kundiman, because it is so drippingly sentinmental. They are what they are today because their elders their parents and their teachers have allowed them to be such.They are incongruities because they cannot be anything else And they cannot be anything else because their elders did not sleep together enough, or did not care enough to fashion them and to mold them into the Filipino pattern. This travel of the barriers that would have protected our Filipinism, this has resulted in something more serious, I refer to the de-Filipinization of our economic animateness. permit us face it. Economically speaking, we Filipinos have become strangers in our own country.And so, today, we are witnesses to the spectacle of a Philippines inhabited by Filipinos who do not act and talk equal Filipinos. We are witnesses to the pathetic sight of a Philippines controlled and dominated and run by non-Filipinos. We have become un veritable to ours elves, we have become traitors to the brave Filipinos who fought and died so that liberty faculty live in the Philippines. We have betrayed the cuss that Rizal reposed on us, we are not true to the faith that energized Bonifacio, the faith that made Gregorio del pilar cheerfully lay down his life at Tirad Pass.