Angela had quite a lot to say about Nick’s attempt to come up with a manifesto for Filipino Voices. The bottom line of all that came to what she says here:

fv’s goals are just a tad lofty. scrap the manifesto. forget about making a difference or influencing the national discourse or doing better than mainstream media or climbing mountains a la martinlutherking. like cvj and marck say, happy naman sila the way it is, which works naman, fv gets a lot of traffic, di ba. and isnt that what counts in the blogosphere?

So stripped of the rest of the fluff, Angela’s core message reveals the raw nature of the underbelly of the Pinoy psyche that infects our society like a deeply-entrenched cancer. Underneath the veneer of sophistication among even the most elite of Pinoy society, manifest in our university vocabularies, stamps on our passports, and superficially trendy cafe-and-nightclub society lies a little insecure adolescent wracked with a compulsion to constantly check out peers head-to-toe and dismiss their aspirations.

On the other hand, Angela reveals a disturbing general reality about Pinoys that I myself have observed for the longest time of which the FV community is merely the latest validation of said observations.

When asked to collaborate and come up with a structured solution, we simply refuse to step up and build.

Nick, for his part, did put forth a call to contribute to the manifesto and issued a challenge to propose a Vision statement (Section 5 of his manifesto) to which I and a couple of others responded. Not a very encouraging response rate, I must say. So Angela’s criticism is fair if it were addressed to FV collectively but a bit unfair if directed to Nick alone who merely provides the environment for the FV community to chatter away.

Having myself attempted a few years ago to elicit some input into a solution framework, even going as far as creating a wiki site to get some random suggestions nailed down, I’m quite aware of how disinclined Pinoys are to stepping up to the task of actually creating a bit of structure around any information that is accumulated.

It is this failure to dream that is the reason behind why we remain stuck with the jeepney and forever addicted to OFW-ism as a pathetic cashflow solution. I’ve often lamented that a lack of imagination is behind our inability to build from what is otherwise a wealth of resources. Whether these resources be physical or intellectual/cultural does not seem to matter. We squander either just the same. Turning chaos into order, the raw into the structured, potential into value; you name it, Pinoys suck at it. In a 2003 article, The wasted collective intellect of Philippine society, I pondered this bizarreness of ours:

Take a moment to wonder: What happens to all the collective experience, skills, insights, and philosophies accumulated by our countrymen from the work they did overseas?

You’d think with all that knowledge, some of it is bound to be properly applied to the Philippine setting. This glaring lack of a nation’s capability to tap the vast knowledgebase residing in the minds of its returning overseas workers further re-enforces the issue of our country not being an environment that rewards innovation and doing things properly.

For all the “ingenuity” we fancy ourselves to possess as a people, the enduring question remains:

Where are the results?

Admittedly I myself am happy with the way FV is at the moment — a great place to test one’s ideas in a free-wheeling blog format. I can’t presume to speak for the rest, but I believe that the opportunity to table ideas and attract debate and discussion among peers is what keeps me coming back. That’s where Nick comes in. He’s rightly so, being FV’s creator, taken it upon himself to see beyond the present state and explore options where FV can evolve beyond.

Somebody’s gotta do it while the kids play.

If the vision succeeds or not or if the options explored are realistic or overly idealistic is not the point. The point is that at least there is an effort to exercise a bit of foresight and vision (which I might remind has NEVER been a strong trait of Pinoys). I personally hold Nick to the task of not simply joining the fray and/or blending into the woodwork as a mere contributor. Just like a love affair that will go stagnant if it does not evolve and grow, FV needs to be constantly seen as a project. There are only so many movie and dinner dates, beach trips, and nightclubbing binges that can be had. Fun and carefree as that stage may be in a relationship, truly strong bonds endure when all parties at least see a possibility to evolve and grow beyond and upon what it’s currently achieved.

There is always a nexus.

Those who do not think so are the ones who I hold responsible for our chronic inability to progress — because they cannot at the very least imagine a prosperous Philippines. It’s a mindset that is bourne of our world-renowned Heritage of Smallness. A mindset that is happy with subsistence and scornful of — no, threatened by — audacity.

As the case may be, maybe FV will simply remain the way it is and never realise Nick’s vision. But then how do its detractors presume to know it fails when they cannot even imagine an attempt to succeed big time?

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