“It is Difficult to Love This Country”

It’s been six days since our mid-term elections, and the grief I feel is still lodged deep in my heart. I share this grief with many friends who have the courage to vent it on social media.

All the eight senatorial candidates I voted for lost. It was a straight win for the administration’s bets. If the results were the choice of the people, I would have said, so be it. 

But there were big, major glitches that could not be explained: over a thousand voting machines conked out; thousands of voters were disenfranchised; there was massive vote buying. And worst of all, there was a seven-hour blackout after the initial results were released where all the administration candidates (some of whom have zero platforms and experience in legislative work; some have been accused of plunder) were leading by a mile.

People stayed up all night waiting for partial results—zilch. Seven hours later, we got the same trend as those initially released.

Reading today the column of an esteemed author and national artist for literature, F. Sionil Jose, whose hometown is next-door to mine, I felt grace woven into his moving prose. He titled it, “It is difficult to love this country, so we leave.” He articulates what I could not begin to express.

May I quote him?

“It is difficult to love this country. But it is easier to do so if we think of her as our motherland, the way our mothers nurtured us, embraced us, and gave us their warmth, their loyalty, and caring . . .

“And so I go to the old hometown often, to look at immemorial vistas of well-cared fields and a people made enduring by work. I go there to listen to a language to which I was born but which I don’t really use anymore. Listening to it, I wallow in memory and I feel alive, keen to the sound of living, of memories of the past that I have read about which I know are now entwined with every fiber of my being as a writer who belongs to this unhappy country.”  
                        

"My Sad Republic" by BenCab*

Yes, it is difficult to love this country, and I will leave it someday. Not to other lands, but to where my citizenship belongs.

"But we are citizens of heaven, where the Lord Jesus Christ lives. And we are eagerly waiting for him to return as our Savior."  Philippians 3:20 (NLT)

*BenCab, short for Benjamin Cabrera, is another Philippine national artist (visual arts-painting).