Filipinos migrate to virtual earthlights

I rarely appreciate my constant chatting and Internet activity. At any one time, I'll be chatting with someone from the Philippines, friends from China, from Switzerland, the USA, Canada, Korea, Africa, latin America or Australia. Putting aside the interaction in the real world, activity in the Internet is connectivity in practice.

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Filipinos are spread the world over, like peanut butter on bread, mainly due to the deteriorating economic situation in their original country. In the Philippines, they are faced with a future (or, alternatively, no future) bleak with uncertainty, brought about by poverty, hunger, disease, lacking or totally without the means to alleviate their families from these problems. Thus they are forced to migrate to 'better lands,' to the 'land of milk and honey,' to 'the land of liberty' and all such slogans - slogans that may even contrast with the bitter realities. That future would now hopefully be their past, no way of going back to that situation, except in the effort of helping their families.

Any movement would naturally be an adjustment, so there is that aftershock after the initial awe and wonder of a new - and, compared to where they came from - and arguably better place. The rude awakening would only come in later. They would realize, for example, that their education would not be recognized, so that M.D. graduates would work as nurses, because of the questionable value of their degree, because the worth of such is deemed suspicious, or simply unworthy of measurement. They would encounter different values, racism, demeaning working and living conditions, so that many of them try to mitigate their alienation by being more traditional than they were back 'home,' so they become more strict (not without the frictions) with their children, or more religious, suddenly law-abiding and politically conservative. So that a friend in the US would be shocked at my opinions about the US government and expectedly ignorant of the foreign policies of her adopted country. Expectedly, yet still surprisingly. These are not inevitable trends.
The value of travel and exposure to different places and cultures, notwithstanding, there is a need to probe the structures that have brought about the mass exodus ('the diaspora,' in the words of the tower intellectuals) of people. For now I will not make this a treatise on the movement of capital and labour and debts and the psychological scarring of a struggling people bombarded by wars, imposed economic policies, etc.; it's 1:43 a.m. No kidding.
Let's just say that while capital is free, labor is stilll in chains. Capital has rights; working and poor people don't. It's the free market democracy. Those with the money can vote on policies, those without it can't. So you have lots of people disenfranchised. Poor people, for example, and future generations yet to come. This has lots of implications on social and environmental issues.

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I remember this orientation being given by the DFA. About a hundred people there. One was going to Japan, the other I think to Korea, this one to the Land Down Under. The rest of it was going to the USA. And most of them to California. I think California is a Filipino colony.

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I am persuaded that people of my generation and those from UP cope better, perhaps because nothing best prepares a person for the uncertain conditionalities of life than education (plus for UP grads, being street-smart) and the relative inexperience and risk-taking of young age, which is not yet that jaded.

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The 'earthlights' analogy is taken from strategic planning talks sponsored by the Pentagon. There is ongoing indoctrination there about the 'have-nots' coming from outside earthlights. From outer space, one can see the illumination coming from big cities like New York, Los Angeles, London, etc, and the coastal areas of China and other cities and less illuminated countries. The 'have-nots' come from the darkness surrounding those lights, and so the shining guardians of the world must look out for these. There is another paradigm of becoming aware (beware) of 'the gap' between the 'haves' and 'have-nots.' So the masters of the universe and their enforcers must understand this and hopefully bridge that gap through the initiative of the US. It is not imposing, it is not intervening; it is the benevolent empire, which has no boundaries and will be indefinite. Welcome to the New (yet staidly old) World Order.