enough of this navel gazing, at least for a weekend, say. enough time, i think, to report to you the state of the pinoy in the u.s. of a.
well, not really in those grandiloquent terms. who am i kidding?
in fact, this post is just a response to a friend's email recently. he, who feel sort of discriminated because of his pinoyness in a birmingham hospital in the queen's realm across the pond, brushed off my suggestion that our kababayan have it good over there in gracious europe than us here duking it out in still gauche america.
au contraire, he said. in fact, he declared, "the condition of pinoys in the usa is the best there is among the filipinos abroad."
i must admit, i am a pinoy still confounded with this great sociological experiment called the united states. and although i have not an iota of credential or inclination to speak for everyone of us farmhands here in uncle sam's ranch, i can say with some degree of cocksureness that there is no such thing as the state of the pinoy in the united states. that's the last thing, it seems, our kababayan wanted to fortify, much less maintain, here.
not unless somebody tells me i've been living so far in some other country, it's getting more and more apparent to me that for most of the kababayan, pinoyness has the rankness of a dirty word, way up there with incest and pedophilia, perhaps.
the quicker we can dye our hair brunette-don't forget the blonde highlights-and fade into the engulfing blandness of white america, that's about the ultimate in making it here. of all the emerging minorities here in the states, us pinoy are notorious for our obsequiousness to the bulldozing demands of the majority.
and then a story such as the following flares up out of nowhere and just about sobers up every self deluding kababayan.
this is a tale of a pinay mother who offered a son to the cause of the american invasion of afghanistan. the son died in combat and the bereaved mother, thinking she had all the rights to, applied for membership to a washington-based sorority of mothers who have lost their sons and daughters in the wars in both irag and afghanistan.
coldly, she was denied membership to the american gold star mothers, all because she wasn't an american citizen.
the grief stricken mother, who ironically is named ligaya (joy) is about to deal with the pain of the grim prospect of losing another loved one, that of her gravely ill husband, a cancer stricken patient.
here's praying ligaya is of stouter stuff, just like her soldier son.
...to be continued tomorrow