People Of The Year 2008
December 29th, 2008 by Ding G. GageloniaEveryone’s counting down the last days of 2008 with the news media releasing their traditional year-ender summaries and tagging the person/s of the year.
This writer humbly submits that for the Philippines the people of the year are our migrant compatriots who continue to toil abroad to keep this country economically afloat.
The OFWs share this distinction in my list with the corrupt in the highest echelons of the government of the day for exactly opposite reason: for weighing down the hopes of the Filipino people and for giving the Philippines the distinction of being tagged the most corrupt nation in Asia.
Also on my marquee are Filipinos who have become apathetic of our country’s sordid cstate of affairs and failing to do their bit one way or another to uplift their personal lot and turning a blind eye on corruption and other crimes in their midst.
Having said this, there still is absolutely no reason for us not to look bat the coming Year of the Ox with hope.
Hope that our resiliency as a people will rise up to the surface and steel us for the harder times ahead while keeping faith in our fellow man.
Signing off till 2009 :)
December 30, 2008 at 7:58 am
That submission that the migrant workers (OFWs) are the people of the year since they toil abroad to keep our national economy afloat isn’t one school of thought that OFWs themselves can understand, at least since 90% of our OFWs are into the labor force across the globe – or the blue collar jobs.
Most of them do not understand how they made the economy afloat but since we keep on telling them that they do, then probably they just know it to be so. In fact, it reflects the fact that in this country, no jobs are available to keep you in subsistence level so some 3,000 Filipinos leave the country each passing day for jobs only our race will accept. We call that virtue – patience (euphemism for our slave mentality).
December 31, 2008 at 6:30 am
The country will never know the true extent of the sacrifices made by Filipinos working abroad: the loneliness, the working conditions, the misconstrued bias of most employers they feel towards these poor workers. It’s true that they keep the economy afloat with the foreign currencies that they send home but these don’t matter to them. What matters more is that with their toil, blood and sweat, they are able to keep their families from starving, send their kids to school and generally let their families enjoy a lifestyle they themselves are deprived of.