Filipinas Dentro de Cien Años (The Philippines a Century Hence)

by Ricky Cantre (1st entry)

"The Filipino embraces civilization and lives and thrives in every clime, in contact with every people.*"

I could imagine the Padre Damasos scoffing at these words when they were first published in La Solidaridad. How could a people, backward and indolent, living in a forsaken corner of the globe, ever embrace civilization, they would ask. How could the natives of this hot and humid archipelago ever thrive in every clime or be in contact with every people when its already so hard to communicate between neighboring islands? Just add a little imagination and you could hear the derisive laughter that follows.

Yet Rizal appears to be in psychic mode when he wrote these words in 1889. I wonder what he would say if told about today's wonders in ICT. He would probably be glad that he wouldn't have to write and edit his manuscripts by hand anymore. He wouldn't even have to spill an ink drop to publish his novels. The internet would take care of that. Noli and El Fili would have audiobook versions and people would read them in their Kindle.

He would most probably be a blogger had he lived today. La Solidaridad would be his blog and del Pilar and Lopez Jaena would be his fellow blog authors. Videos of their patriotic speeches would be seen in YouTube and the text would be spread by email, SMS or Twitter.

I wonder if he would stick to letter-writing when he could simply text his sweet nothings to Leonor Rivera while at the same time checking Josephine Bracken's FaceBook account. What would he say about the ease with which sex-videos could be distributed these days? Would he be appalled by the alleged erosion of our "conservative values" as we move through the Information Age?

We'll probably never know. But it doesn't matter. What matters is that Rizal was about our age when he wrote his essay and he saw a bright future. We are that future. In his words, "...we must not turn away in horror, and so instead of closing our eyes we will face what the future may bring.*"

* Borrowed from Charles E. Derbyshire's translation of the original Spanish text.