What Is Your Legacy

GLIMPSES
By Jose Ma. Montelibano

In a recent meeting, someone said, “This is my legacy, the one I want others to continue for me if anything should happen to me.”

I am a senior citizen. Among people my age, it is not strange for thoughts of our mortality being part of a conversation. By this time, there have been many friends and acquaintances that have passed away. Legacies, then, can be areal concern of many among us.

However, it was a young man in his early thirties, healthy and just starting his career as a painter and artist, who was talking about his the legacy he wanted to leave behind. It was so important to him that he expressed this “death” wish in writing to a few people close to him.

In that small meeting were all individuals who are in pursuit of a dream, all part of a new generation of Filipino Americans in their twenties to their forties. I was the odd man out, so to speak, being twenty years older than the youngest among them. Yet, I felt no older, and they felt no younger, in a common cause we were all part of, driven by a common dream for our people and our motherland.

In the last three years, I have been traveling to the United States every quarter as part of my work to promote Gawad Kalinga (GK). A US-based partner of GK was interested in expanding the awareness about the work to Filipino-Americans, and then, hopefully, to engage a greater number to actively supporting GK with both funds and presence. It was agreed that I would help him find ways and means to make this happen.

It has been a special experience for me, almost a spiritual journey to make not just more friends but to become more intimate with the reasons why Filipinos left their motherland for America. I had wrongly assumed that it was just for the money, but had been right that most immigrants may have considered themselves as poor but were not actually from the poorest of the poor in the Philippines. In fact, they came from economic Classes C and upper D, with some even from Class A. In other words, they were not the most financially desperate among Filipinos.

They may have had money in mind, but they had other reasons as well, maybe even more driving than just income. There have been a few waves of migration from the Philippines to America, and all may say that they were in search of greener pastures. However, greener pastures have more to do about opportunity, about choices, than just plain income. At least one reason that drove many Filipinos here for a period of about twenty years as ro escape from a country because freedom was suppressed. What was common among Filipino immigrants was a sense of desperation.

America is a dream choice among Filipinos who desperately want to have a chance for a radically new life for themselves and their families. But, then, again, America is a dream choice not only for Filipinos, so much so that the United States has to carefully control the in-migration to the country from all over the world. As a result, many Filipinos with that sense of desperation find themselves in countries they may not really prefer but find as a better option than staying in the Philippines.

Because opportunity is translated also as higher income which opens more doors, the poverty that afflicts the Philippines definitely drives many Filipinos to foreign lands. But opportunity may also mean the greater freedom for mobility, for exposure and knowledge, or for simple expression. Corruption and a feudal system which has persisted despite the political independence of the Philippines combines in a very insidious manner with poverty to limit economic growth of poor families and to suppress the freedom for most other aspirations.
Leaving the motherland is hardly because there is a diluted sense of patriotism, but because patriotism itself is denied development in a citizen’s heart. To the life of a poor person or family, what then is country? What would make a poor person or family, landless and without the right to be in any square meter in their land of birth – and without the means to rent that right? What benefits are derived from a land of obvious plenty by a Filipino family who is only a step ahead of hunger while public officials of the land can spend millions for a dinner in New York? What can make a Filipino love the Philippines other than a birth in a motherland not yet of his or her choice?

The challenge now rests heavily on the shoulders of Filipinos who have reason to love our motherland. It may be that, like me, the circumstance of birth favored me economically, socially and politically. It may be like those who built on their boldness, on their education, on their perseverance, and, most likely, on their business sense, and can now help others. It may be that, like most Filipinos, a basic goodness, a sense of bayanihan and a commitment to walang iwanan, transcends personal interest in order to give succor to a fellow Filipino. When Filipinos go beyond the boundaries of family and clan to care for another as a brother or sister of the same motherland, then even the impoverished and marginalized are given good reasons to love country and race.

The young man had said in my presence and in the presence of comrades in the same cause, “This is my legacy, the one I wish others would continue for me in case anything should happened to me.”
I have asked myself since then, “What is mine?” And I ask you, “What is yours?”
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