
National Pride & Philippine History
[by Danilo P. Cruz]
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!I CANNOT SUFFICIENTLY BELABOR the importance of teaching Philippine history. Ms. Liza Soberano, a popular movie and television actress, has a point about national pride. That is something other Asian countries have and we don’t. That alone guarantees making us the basket case of Asia. You don’t have national pride or a sense of country as I myself put it, you’ll get nowhere.
How to instill that pride? I know of no better way than for us to learn our history. By history, i do not just mean names and dates, though I don’t mind even that so long as history is taught.
I can tell you that the sensation of reading Rizal’s novels, the Noli and Fili, for the first time without them being school assignments is quite literally an eye-opener. It’s like having been blind your whole life and suddenly been given sight.
That was true as well reading about Bonifacio and the Katipunan, Mabini and the American Occupation, and the things that happened afterwards. Suddenly, you no longer feel like an orphan in the universe. Suddenly you no longer feel like a drifter in the world. You have a home you can take refuge in, you have an ancestry you can be proud of.
For the information of Ms. Ella Cruz, another young entertainer today who was chosen by the Marcos camp to grace in a movie about the last 72 hours of the family’s stay in Malacañang during the 1986 Edsa People Power Revolution, there are only three things that can assure a past, a present and a future and that is for us to learn our history.
Those are the very same three things we do not have today, especially under the present regime. We have no past to take pride in, we have no present to be happy about, we have no future to look forward to.**