Is the Filipino Culture Damaged? The Filipino culture is damaged. According to most anthropologists, we take in as many foreign cultures as we can and give it a Filipino twist and then claim it as our own. That is true but in that process of accumulation, we start to mutate our own culture.
We mutate our culture by taking in so much foreign influence that we eradicate what is Filipino, our tradition and culture. During the pre-Hispanic and the post-Hispanic era, most of the Filipinos knew nothing of divorce or annulment, but ever since the American occupation Filipinos have taken a different view on the concerns of marriage. Marriage for most people has become a means for satisfying one's need for the other without taking in consideration the responsibilities that comes with it. Marital conflicts that were usually resolved within the family were taken to a higher level, to the courts of law.
Photo of Oprah Winfrey at her 50th birthday party ...
Winfrey on the first national broadcast of The Opr...
English: Oprah Winfrey Show taping with 2008 Summe...Now, each other's attorneys do the Filipino tradition of intimate conversations between husband and wife to iron things out. Although there is little advocating done for the passage of the divorce bill in congress, the mere presence of such minority means that there is clamoring for it. We've seen it on tele-novelas, Oprah, daytime soaps, and primetime teeney bopper shows like Popular. Too much can really affect our thinking that it's more practical than it is not practicable. Practical because it can solve our bed-sharing and money-sharing and whatever-sharing problems in a snap. What we forget is that it is not practicable because our dominant faith is against it and that even before marriage, the only thing that a couple shared was love for one another, not some squeaky bed.
Kids nowadays think that the next to going to heaven, the biggest place to go to is the U.S. This is true because I thought that way too. We mock those who can't speak with an American twang as Barok, pertaining to a mountain man. A mountain man, one of the first people to mold our culture to what it is today. We call dark skinned people Baluga or Aeta, pertaining to those who taught the American service men in Pampangga how to survive in the jungles, yet we give more respect to the Americans.
Things could've been a lot different if the government and the education department check what they've been teaching to grade school students all these years. Maria always had to go to the market while Anne stayed in her nice Canadian farming town in that island. Things could've been different if they taught us that life is like a pair of tsinelas, once you lose one of them you could never find a use for the one you have left. If they taught us that life in western countries is different than the one that we have here, we'd be in a much better place. We'll never expect that firemen have big nice fire stations and Dalmatian dogs. It's always hard to expect for nothing from nothing.
The Filipino culture is damaged but not hopeless because the Filipino person is not yet extinct. All we have to do is to strengthen that which is of the positive side of our culture and inculcate that which is good to our children and their children's children and so on and so forth.
Filipino House
The Laguna Copperplate Inscription (circa 900AD) f...
Piolo Pascual, Filipino actor