Bayan vs the elite

Bonifacio. They never believed Bonifacio’s concept was at par with the way nations were de

Eventually, the colonial education implemented by the Americans in English further divided the people, where most people are left out by those that had education from the business of economy and government.

This shouldn’t be construed as a clear-cut dichotomy. That the elites are all bad and the bayan are always correct. And that there are complications or in between.

But even in recent history, the struggle between EDSA Dos (2) or EDSA Tres (3), or even how intellectuals, who by education had become elites albeit not in

and consciousness, call Duterte voters “Irineo Salazar also shows the complication when the elite infiltrates the bayan through rhetoric for their own gain (so it doesn’t mean that if one speaks like bayan, they are bayan).

The goal, according to Salazar, is to build the “

sneeringly or national discourse, where people talk about things that have “to them, but this can only be done if we use the same language and concepts. This is why to reach the bayan, we should develop Filipino as an intellectual language and the language of government and economy since this, by default and historical processes, is the language that most Filipinos understand, while also developing local languages.

And hopefully, in time, we will reduce the gap and just maybe, bridge the gap between the elite and the bayan to form a united Filipino nation,

Erratum

truly

Historians are not infallible and are human. In my column of November 2 on the Battle of Midway, I wrote that the Japanese destroyed

- riers” and planes docked at Pearl Harbor. Instead of “carriers,” the correct term should have been “battleships.” No carriers were destroyed at Pearl Harbor.