Divorce, jeepneys, WPS, U.S.: Filipinos at heart (2)

Go deeper like a poet even once in a while, for in the depth of things is the best answer to every question.

Please don't call jeepneys the "jeepneys" that are presently plying or playing in the streets of Metro Manila. Awkward. These four-wheel calves are neither jeeps nor jeepneys but minibuses that the government wants to see running on our roads to "replicate" and replace the real jeepneys.

Fine. Commendable. Go ahead with your transport modernization programs and develop bigger, modernized jeepneys, but do it with the looks and features of jeepneys still intact and readily noticeable in them — Instead of creating a screwed-up mindset among our people for everyone to call something (by a name) for what it is not. Incongruous. When have buses become jeepneys and vice versa?

Retire corruption and inanity, and the old, retirable jeepneys, but never retire our beautiful heritage and our brave, artful, flavorful, artistic, romantic, humble, amiable, down-to-earth, adventurous, original identity as Filipinos. There is more to the issue of modernization than "modernization." The Filipino jeepney partly epitomizes our soul as a nation. It symbolizes many unique and wonderful things about being a Filipino since our heroism is in liberating ourselves from foreign dominations.

There was already a Filipino jeepney long before the first jeepney existed in the country during the 20th-century wars.

Alas, some soulless creatures today are just too eager and out to go by the global standards, so much so that they are too willing to adapt to "globalization" and anything associated with it by dumping their Filipino soul — and as if "providing Filipinos with a system that is safe, reliable, convenient, and environmentally sustainable" is possible only after selling their souls and/or buying the souls of other nations. "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" — Mark 8:36

Modernize, but calibrate and conform to patriotism, humanism and heroism — or lose in the battle to achieve meaningful, genuine, steady, immortal, ageless progress for Filipinos — or, worse, be lost in the gush and jungle of "modernization" and the sticky, heavy mud of "globalization" or gumbo.

Why, indeed, dump our jeepneys? Why phase out their attributes, markers, and Filipino fingerprints only to give our nation a face and spirit that are not its own? Stop governing our country in ways that will make naturally smiling faces frown. However old, my mother is now (100 years old, turning 101 in February), I love her just the same. And I will never allow her to be brought and "cared for" in the Home for The Aged just like how Americans do to their elderly "loved" ones. Sob.