WAVE IT

I saw many small American paper flags at a supermarket yesterday and realized that tomorrow is the independence day of my American friends and kababayan in the United States. I am very happy for them that they are enjoying their stay in the land of milk and honey as we always say. However, with the threats of violence at any instant,that feeling could be diminished easily and probably they could be asking themseles, "was it right for me to settle down here at all?"

Everywhere there is now violence, in our country, the Philippines, included. When I visited Europe in the 80's I could never this high level of violence at all. But in 1994, while I was in the underground taking a train in London, I heard a loud explosion. Then while approaching the platform where I would take the ride to Reading where my cousin, Carol lived, I saw three East European people, two men and one woman. They were changing clothes hurriedly. I wanted to shout and call the attention of the police, but I was afraid that they would turn their anger against me. And so I just went by casually as if I had not noticed anything. 

Going back to America, I wonder what kind of independence  they could be asking themselves now? Independence to elect the highest official of the land has been compromised. And isn't that what the liberators in 1776 fought for, the right not only to be free from the aristocrats of Britain but also to elect their own officials?

Indeed times have been a-changing. 

What big problems did the Americans overcome in the last three centuries? In 1920, the American women were given the right to vote which was carried over to our country in 1937 under the administration of  Americans.  It was only in 1955 when Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks, women of color had refused to give up their seats in the bus as colored people had to take the seats at the back of the bus and reserve the front seats for the white people. 

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 gave the black people the right to vote, labor rights and other basic civil rights, including their right not to be segregated in society. 

In the 70's the second wave of the feminist movement in the United States arose which had focused on social as well as personal Individual rights of women such as in the family, the workplace and in the larger society -- the changes in the custody and divorce law among others. *

Culturally, the US has a lot to offer, from Broadway shows to operas, puppetry, film and digital innovations, and many many more. 

Those are not too far from our memory and we are grateful that the experiences of liberation in many aspects of the American people inspired our activists also to pursue similar movements. In the 60's we had the onset of the women's movement which focused on love of country versus imperialism. In the 80's, our own second wave of feminism focussed on the same  individual rights of women in the family, the community and the larger society. It has continued to this day. 

But the very affluence in the United States is very difficult to achieve in our country, except by a few moneyed elite. The US has a large middle class who can afford to have clothes-changing through the four seasons, and have their refrigerators stacked with food for a week, whereas our population has a larger sector of poor people -- living in carts, sleeping on the sidewalks,  making love on top of tombstones at the Manila North Cemetery for lack of funds to go to a motel, maybe, children who climb onto jeepneys and wipe shoes in the hope of getting a coin or paper bill, and many many more. 

What am I saying here? The freedom that the Americans got in 1776 has brought them to where they are now, a lot wealthier that our own -- culturally, economically, but sad to say politically made barren by the ascendancy of a pretender to the throne. 

Who knows, next year what kind of independence celebration the United States will have? 

Anyway, wave, wave it high the flag of independence!


(* sexuality, family, the workplace,reproductive rights, de facto inequalities, and official legal inequalities.^[4] Second-wave feminism also drew attention to domestic violence and marital rape issues, establishment of rape crisis and battered women's shelters, and changes in custody and divorce law.

Many historians view the second-wave feminist era in America as ending in the early 1980s with the intra-feminism disputes of thefeminist sex wars over issues such as sexuality and pornography, which ushered in the era of third-wave feminism in the early 1990s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-wave_feminism)^{[5][6][7][8][9]}