Those Who Keep Saying “I am Proud to be a Filipino” When Manny Pacquiao Wins are Morons

“Here we go again”, I said to myself.“Another Manny Pacquiao win which will predictably bring about deluges of the 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”. These kinds of blabberings are not isolated to victories of “Pac Man” but they also happen when other individuals such as Charice Pempengco, Arnel Pineda or Lea Salonga gain acclaim outside of the Filipino sphere.

Distinguish Individual Achievements from Collective Achievements

These Filipinos do not realize that the feats of those mentioned are INDIVIDUAL accomplishments and not COLLECTIVE ones so it wasn’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. You and even I can say I 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 a Filipino, The Philippines should be a progressive country 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 Gel 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 the Filipino people better. It worsens their propensities toward triumphalism making them bad winners, sore losers and people not worthy of any respect – Pacquiao or no Pacquiao.

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Tags: antonio margarito, boxing, boxing match, charice pempengco, fight, filipino, filipinos, freddie roach, gel santos relos, Manny Pacquiao, mexican, mexicans, mexico, Philippines

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rafterman has written 9 stories on this site.

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