Dead Men Dreaming

In 1896, the Philippine Revolution began. Brave Filipino men offered their lives for the liberation of the country from Spain. As these brave men lay dying in the battlefield, as they bathed in their own blood, watching their comrades fall one by one, nostalgically staring at the sky that was then partially concealed by the thick gun smoke, their bodies rattling from the tremors caused by the cannonballs crashing into the bloodied ground, their lungs sucking in the last few breaths they could take, what could they have been thinking? What were they dreaming of? Could they have been dreaming of seeing the Philippine flag—which didn’t even exist yet then—being waved triumphantly from the window of a mansion in Cavite? Were they dreaming of the medals that would be posthumously given to them? Were they even dreaming of seeing more Spaniards die? Or were they hoping that after the war, their families would live in freedom?


Today, in a time of Filipino Diaspora, when millions of Filipinos are scattered all over the world, finding employment in various countries, there are again deafening calls for patriotism. The country, many nationalist intellectuals say, is in need of heroes. Heroes who won’t have to shoot the enemy or die brutally in battle. The country’s best and brightest are being asked to stay here so that this poor nation, and this nation alone, shall benefit from their talents. The doctors, engineers, nurses and teachers are being asked to be content with their meager salaries here and ignore the lucrative offers that await them abroad.

But how does one really become a hero? How does one become a patriot? Sometimes I wish heroism would always be as clear and as equivocal as the acts of shooting the invaders and dying in the battlefield. But no, things aren’t that simple. Yet countless intellectuals are shamelessly presenting their simplistic notions of patriotism. To them, a skilled Filipino worker can be a hero if he stays in this country and never entertains the idea of being employed abroad. Because if he works abroad, he is contributing to the economy of another nation and his own country fails to benefit from its investments (education, infrastructure, social services) in him.

Well, it’s easy to be simplistically patriotic if you don’t have to lose your soul in the process. But if you are a nurse working as a volunteer (with no pay) in a godforsaken hospital somewhere in the impoverished Philippine countryside and you are tasked to pull the plug on unconscious patients whose families could no longer afford to maintain the life support system required for the patients’ survival, would you not wish that you were just working abroad, earning big bucks so that someday you could return to your country and help your poor patients financially? Wouldn’t you wish that you were never there to do your task in front of the patients’ relatives, being remembered as the nurse who murdered their loved one even though you were just doing your job? If you are an ordinary soldier and you are being ordered by your corrupt superiors to torture a female college student suspected of being a communist sympathizer, wouldn’t you wish that you were just a carpenter abroad who didn’t have to harm the innocent? If you are a brilliant college graduate from an obscure state university and the only job you can get in your small town is as a member of the staff of a corrupt politician, wouldn’t you wish that you were just abroad, saving enough money so that someday your children could graduate from a reputable university and wouldn’t have to compromise their ideals just to earn a living?

What benefit will this country get if in our attempt to hoard the most talented people, we end up forcing them to sell their souls?

Now, let’s say you are a teacher in a public high school. You’ve seen countless bright students graduate and eventually lead successful lives. But your own children, the ones who might even be brighter than any student you’ve had before, could not even finish college because your meager income would never allow you to save enough for their tuitions. What would you do? You can try augmenting your income by selling snacks to your students and co-teachers. And for your effort, you would be rewarded with ridicule. How many times have we heard jokes about teachers being the vendors in Philippine schools? Countless times. And you will certainly hear a lot more of them. So will your children. That’s why out of pragmatism, you decide to work abroad for 3-5 years. And for that, the fanatically nationalistic intellectuals would brand you as unpatriotic. How much more insensitive can this country be to its heroes? You leave this country for a few years and then suddenly, all the many years you’ve spent heroically teaching young Filipinos for some loose change flies into oblivion. Isn’t heroism defined as the love for country? Those students that you will not be able to teach while you are abroad, you know they are certainly a part of this country. But so are your own children. Who has the right to say that the college education of your children is far less important than the high school education of the other young Filipinos? Wouldn’t be it better for you to ignore the misguided nationalists’ harsh remarks and just go ahead with your plan to work abroad so that someday, when you’ve saved enough for your children’s college education, you can return and teach in that public high school again without having to worry about your finances?

Say you are a young Filipino engineer. Your parents just spent all of their savings on your college education. It’s already been a year since you have earned your professional license and the most that your employer can give you is a 12,000-peso monthly salary, which would be enough for you to subsist but terribly insufficient to cover the expenses for the college education of your four younger siblings who also dream of becoming engineers. Wouldn’t you want to spend a few years working abroad for a higher pay so that your family would have four more engineers? Who would have the right to say that your siblings’ future is far less important than the welfare of the Filipino company that employs you? Who would have the right to say that your bright siblings’ contribution to the country’s industrial sector would be far less significant than that of the employer you’d abandon?

What benefit do we Filipinos get if, in our attempt to keep our most brilliant people here and hidden from the rest of the world, we end up depriving their children and younger siblings of the education they deserve? What’s the point in deepening the country’s current pool if it comes at the cost of badly depleting that of the future? And what will happen to those wasted bright people who deserve to but would never be engineers, scientists, teachers and doctors? They would lose their chance to build successful careers but certainly not their brilliance-- the same kind of brilliance that makes it possible for crime lords, terrorists and rebels to succeed.

You know there’s gotta be something wrong with a country if almost all of its talented young people are dreaming of working abroad. This country must have a disease that urgently needs to be cured. But stopping the exodus is not the cure. The exodus, in the first place, is not the disease. You stop the exodus and the disease will still be there, whatever it is.

If they want to leave, let them, the best thing we can do is to ask them to return someday, though it would be foolish to expect them to return if they’d be treated as unpatriotic traitors when they get home.

Now, some geniuses out there might point out that most of the overseas Filipino workers’ income just goes to over-consumption and practically none of it goes to real, significant investments. Well. If you gather the ten best professors of literature in this country, give them US$10,000,000 and ask them to set up a business using the money given them, could you guarantee that their business plan would be successful? Can you guarantee that none of the US$10,000,000 would go to waste? What about the country’s ten best physicists? Would they be more successful than the professors of literature? How about the ten best mathematicians? The ten best chemists? The ten best sociologists? How then do we expect each of the returning overseas Filipino workers –engineers, scientists, doctors, nurses, carpenters, domestic helpers, etc.—to miraculously become financial geniuses and come up with sound business plans or investment schemes when they return here? They need financial guidance. Education. They must be made aware of what they can do with their money other than using it to pamper their relatives. A strong link must be made between the country’s brilliant but capital-hungry entrepreneurs and the relatively cash-rich overseas Filipino workers. And here lies the great opportunity- one that hasn’t been taken for a long time. This opportunity is being wasted, as proven by the over-consumption of the overseas Filipino workers’ families. But the worst thing anyone can do when an opportunity is being wasted is to destroy that opportunity so that no one can say that it’s being wasted! That would be the height of stupidity. That reeks of the same stupidity displayed by the idiots who suggest that the exodus must be stopped because much of the overseas Filipino workers’ money is just going to over-consumption anyway!

Heroism is not only a matter of killing the enemy. More than anything, it's about saving your own people. And the last thing we should think of in rescuing this nation of ours from poverty is killing the economies of other nations by hoarding our talented professionals. When we indiscriminately keep our brilliant workers from grabbing better career opportunities abroad so that they'd be forced to stay as underemployed and underpaid workers here, we become no different from ruthless dictators who forcefully turn all their surviving young constituents into suicide bombers! What point is there in hurting the enemy, if it comes at the cost of destroying your own people? In our search for enlightenment on true heroism, we must remember what the heroes of our revolution were thinking when they lay half-dead in the battlefield. Were they more concerned about destroying the enemy or making sure that their loved ones would live happily?