Blending with the scenery
Filipinos’ readiness to adapt to even the most difficult situations like bad traffic and oratorical excesses at the top makes the country inhospitable to reform.
In our culture we try to avoid sticking out like an un-hammered nail. The ability to blend in is essential to Filipinos living and working overseas. The readiness and even yearning to be accepted by adapting to the local culture, with its unwritten rules and taboos allow the immigrant to look like he belongs.
Integration into the local milieu involves acquiring the right accent and imbibing the formulaic responses to greetings and small talk with strangers. (How are you feeling today? I’m good.) Beyond this verbal skill lies the adoption of the local work ethic, attire, traffic rules, transactional proficiency for shopping and banking as well as celebrating local holidays.
The Filipino abroad is a cultural chameleon that can effortlessly chuck his past baggage and take on such cultural habits like hockey madness with the intricacies of that game and fan behavior or Thanksgiving dinners and their required menus and home decor. He acquires a taste for winter clothes and the intricacies of traffic rules as applied to crossroads. As a reptile, the chameleon conceals itself against his background by taking on the color of its surroundings and blending into these as a defense mechanism. This same ability to disappear into the new habitat comes naturally to us as a people. We would rather not disagree even with disagreeable people to avoid confrontation and making a scene and attracting unwanted attention. We avoid having our parochial views challenged by prevailing conventional wisdom. The acquisition of a large company and the entry of a new management team require this chameleon talent. The old guards are not so much eager to please as loath to attract the attention of the nail clippers. They would rather be left unnoticed by adopting the new culture and attire.
It is not surprising then that in politics, the winner ends up with the biggest party. Those who switch to the winning side are not to be dismissed as mere turncoats, they are realists who just want to belong, and be part of the new landscape. The chameleon is not an aggressive predator after all. It just wants to be left alone to bask in the sun and wait for an unwary insect to snack on. (I thought it was just a log.)
Is it perhaps our four hundred years under four foreign states (if you count two years under the British) that have rearranged our national DNA to be accommodating to the powers that be and to not stick out?
During the twenty-year martial rule, this penchant for accommodation ( going along and getting along) kept the dictatorship unchallenged for a long time. Relatives that had gone underground were not always treated as heroes even by their families and friends trying to get under the radar screen of the authorities. Most of the time, rebels were seen as dragging their families towards unwanted scrutiny.
The reason Filipinos do well enough abroad to send back billions of dollars home is not just self-selection which favors the adventurous and hardworking. It is also their talent to absorb the culture they find as they take pains to blend in and not be perceived as outsiders. They may not always graduate into being wealthy pillars of society. But they often succeed in blending unnoticed to go about their lives.
This readiness to adapt to even the most difficult situations like bad traffic and oratorical excesses at the top makes the country inhospitable to reform. For change to be considered there has to be deep dissatisfaction with and raging anger at the current state of affairs. This state of dissatisfaction goes against the grain of a culture that can accept chaos as a given. It’s just the way things are. You need to figure it out to survive. Reformers are by definition unhappy and discontented, making them socially irritating to the chameleons.
While this extraordinary ability to accommodate to anything sharpens our survival instincts, it also happily precludes us as a country from ever getting into a civil war. Reformers are too easily perceived as simple whiners to be ignored.
Wanting to be just part of the scenery betrays an almost pathetic need to belong. It’s a strong argument for keeping the status quo… until without warning, the landscape changes.