Facing the Challenge of National Pride

If right this moment, we are to stand before a huge crowd of different faces and races, spotlight on us, and our being a Filipino is the only characteristic we have that is being made known to everyone looking, how do we feel? Register that initial feeling you have towards such a situation - that raw and unprocessed emotion you have before your brain and reasoning started working. 

Many things happened, a lot are taking place, and more will happen that can influence the image of the Philippines and of its citizens. In the web of all these events, whether positive or negative, shameful or something to be proud of, good or bad, the fact will remain that we are who we are - Filipinos. How we feel about it is where the challenge is cast. 

As God’s creation, we are no accident, every detail in our life has been wonderfully, thoughtfully, and perfectly designed by Him. Knowing this, our natural response should be gratitude and pride towards the identity He gave us including our race and nation. While it is ideal to feel this way, our failure to realise how uniquely God created us, which is a form of identity crisis, sheds light to the bad, the negative, and the shameful reasons why we may feel otherwise. 

While we can enumerate the many reasons why we should be proud of our being a Filipino and the reasons why we must feel shame, such is not the point. Doing so is like listing down conditions, a checklist that must be ticked before we get to possess national pride as a virtue. Or in most cases, the natural response where we feel proud when good and positive things take place and ashamed when it’s the other way. The list will be endless and bad and good things will continue to happen, meaning the value of national pride is inconsistent and again, conditional. What can we do when the circumstances and other people are beyond our control?

Let us go back to who we are, we are altogether beautiful and perfect, there is no flaw in us. As God’s handiworks and created to do good works that were laid out before us even before we were born, let us focus on the things that are within our control and stop fretting on matters beyond. Taking a look at the reasons why shame is the winner over national pride, let us strive to turn the tables around and understand these events from the perspective of our individual perfection and uniqueness. 

We must take every negative circumstance as an opportunity to continue doing good. That while the reason to feel shame is overwhelming and while foreigners may judge or belittle us, we must see it as a chance to prove them wrong. We must not let anyone look down on us, but set an example for others in our speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity.  We are the key, the light, and the instrument to define what our nation is, who its people are, and demonstration of the value of national pride. In such a scenario, all the conditions in our checklist become irrelevant. We become the reason for national pride and our consistency towards feeling proud of our race and our country will never again be put to question.

Going back to our first scenario, spotlight on us as Filipino, standing before a huge crowd of various nationalities, what do we feel? (Keren May Busaing, CRFV)