Reflection Paper on Philippine Society

ADRIAN V. ABON

Reflection on Philippine Society

What is society?

Society is a group of people, having their own way of life that sustains its existence. It is a definition that I see fit to what we can see and observe in our society today.

Through the years, society has help human beings conquer their surroundings and improve their way of life. Society help us grow as individual, develops us and hones us our full potential.

Society can be mentioned as a by product of our nature to socialize. We can see these on how we human beings prosper through the help of others or our “kapwa”. Through their help we can reach far beyond our imagination and move upward in the world. This relationship is what we can call “pakikipag-kapwa tao”.

What is good about Philippine society?

Filipinos are friendly people. We are joyful individual who can create happy moments even in the midst of our problems. We can easily conquer stress and problems by laughing it out. Like Freddie Aguilar, one of the famous singers and song writer in our country, said in his song, "tawanan mo ang yong problema”. I see this happening all the time, because our community is not composed of well-off individual. I observe my friends who are hard laborers find time to have a moment to laugh in the midst their problems with money and work. They never give up and never lose hope that every day is a new day that is full of opportunity.

This is what I think we can be proud of as a Filipino. Being a poor country, we are a society of survivor. We survived many hardships in the past – colonized by different races, ruled by a dictator and bullied by other powerful country. Despite all of it, we remain strong as a society.

Another good trait, I think, is our practice of “bayanihan”. Helping others is in our nature even when we barely know them. We are a society full of good samaritans who are ready to help a fellow Filipino in need.

What ails (is bad about) Philippine society?

One thing that makes our society slower in its progress is our practice of crab mentality. We tend to be envious when we see other people progress in life. We try to pull them down, damaging their dreams and success. It is a sad reality of our society that not all of what we call friends are true friends.

In my opinion I see that nowadays we are changing into a society who tolerates wrong doings for the benefit of few people. For instance, the war on drugs that brought about so many deaths for the so-called objective of attaining peace and prosperity.

Another is our practice of imitating other countries especially the westerners. We try to patronize their products and not our own (colonial mentality), saying that our product is nothing to compared with the product of other countries. We always try to imitate other countries which left us forget how to think out of the box.

Imitating the business of fellow businessman is also a bad practice in our society. If one come up with an idea of putting up a business and that business prospers. Many other will follow and make the same business, which in turn will divide and eventually saturate the market and in the end they will all have few revenues.