Anti-Pinoy blogger, rafterman, believes his countrymen should hold up a mirror and not base “Filipino pride” on the merit of a sole athlete.

 

After the fight, Margarito called Pacquiao the best fighter on the planet, and the bruises on his face supported his statement.

 

“Here we go again”, I said to myself. “Another Manny Pacquiao win which will predictably bring about a deluge of false and undeserved claims of ‘Filipino Pride’ from Filipinos who want to bask in borrowed glory and show arrogance based on strengths they never have.”

Just log on to the popular websites like Youtube or Facebook and you will see a lot of Filipinos expressing how “proud” they are to be “Pinoys” and saying Manny Pacquiao is the reason for their “pride”. This kind of blabbering is not isolated to victories of PacMan but also happens when other individuals such as Charice Pempengco, Arnel Pineda or Lea Salonga gain acclaim outside of the Philippines.

 

Distinguish individual achievements from collective achievements

These Filipinos do not realise that the feats of those mentioned are individual accomplishments and not collective ones so it isn’t really the entire Filipino nation who won or gained acclaim but just the individuals themselves.”

These Filipinos do not realise that the feats of those mentioned are individual accomplishments and not collective ones so it isn’t really the entire Filipino nation who won or gained acclaim but just the individuals themselves. When you say you are “Proud to be a Filipino”, it means that you are proud of the achievements of the collective group of people who comprise Philippine society and/or identity. Such a demographic is still wanting in collective accomplishment so you cannot really say you are proud of the Filipino as a group especially if you base it on a very minuscule, cherry-picked cross section of the said group. We can say we admire Charice Pempengco, but I will not force my association with her and claim her pride as my own by throwing in something we have in common by accident of our birth.

For one to be proud to be Filipino, the country should be a progressive through the cooperative efforts of its own people.

 

Pinoy arrogance rears its ugly head

After the Pacquiao victory, a media practitioner from ABS-CBN named Gel Santos Relos posted a tasteless and very low joke dragging the entire country of Mexico into the defeat of Antonio Margarito. Here is the screenshot of the very tacky statement that Santos found humorous and even passed on:

 

 

We have to remember that the fight between Manny Pacquiao and Antonio Margarito is a fight just between the two of them. It is not a fight between the Filipino nation and the Mexican nation. Why do we have to drag people and their sad plight into something as petty as a boxing match? Is this the correct behavior for a media practitioner? She must be forgetting that a lot of Filipinos are in the same situation as the Mexican “border crossers” and she should have the decency to not make fun of them. She is not an ordinary person but a media personality who many look up to as an example. Things like this do not help in making Filipinos better. It worsens their propensities toward triumphalism making them arrogant winners, sore losers and people not worthy of any respect – Pacquiao or no Pacquiao.

 

This post was originally published on Anti-Pinoy in November 2010.