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Raised an Expat, Became a Patriot
I was raised as an expatriate in the Philippines. But for some reason we never used the term Expatriate. Maybe that’s because my parents are evangelical missionaries of the Baptistic persuasion. All our self characterizations were based in theological categories. Terms like expat were reserved for retired britishers who were making their quid fly a bit further by retiring in Asia.
But we certainly were not migrants or immigrants. Whatever our official legal status was in the good ol PI we were for all practical purposes expats. We were Americans living in a foreign country. We made no attempt to become Filipino, and we certainly were not there to make money. Our family consciously maintained an American identity. And this is not at all rare for evangelical missionaries. Paul’s idea that “apostles” (literally sent ones) should become all things to all men has very literal traction in the foreign Missions community. They give it lip service all the time but rarely is it evident in their lives.
This is especially easy to do in the Philippines. For one thing there are something like 70+ dialects spoken throughout the archipelago. Also the PI occupies an area of land that is similar to the Levant because it is both a hub and crossroads. This translates to a wide variety of “racial” and social distinctions. The upshot is Filipinos are very good at getting along with others. Despite being a majority catholic nation they are a melting pot’s melting pot. So expats face virtually no obstacles living there.
This applies doubly for American expats. The Philippines and the US have always gotten along famously. There was some tension during Marcos’ dictatorship (sadly there was little tension between Marcos and US leadership, since they backed his dictatorship) and currently we are not best buds with Duterte, but tension between our two great countries is like a really good day between us and Russia. After all we fought three wars together. We fought the Spanish together. Then after they were gone we fought each other. Then most iconically we fought Imperial Japan.
In fact the Philippines came close to becoming a US state more than once. They really are numbered amongst our “happy few” our “band of brothers.” Our blood was split together more than once. The Bataan death march may be the tragic height of this brotherhood. During my 6th grade outdoor ed trip our entire middle school went to the island of Corregidor where General MacArthur escaped on a PT boat only to eventually return with all the thunder that Uncle Sam could muster. On the way there we stopped at the Mt. Samat memorial to the US and Filipino forces that fell together as prisoners of the Imperial Army.
Our history teacher Mr. Keefer stood under the gigantic cross and told us the story, the horrible story, of how over 60,000 soldiers marched together for 60 miles in the unbearable equatorial heat. Thousands died on the way. But it all started with the single largest surrender of US forces ever.
That may have been the first time I had an inkling of what America meant. America simply is different from everything that has come before. Because it is a nation built from the nations. It does not exist to perpetuate a people or a culture. It exists to obtain, secure, and perpetuate freedom for those who truly want it. It is not really a democracy. It is not really a location. It is a creed. Essentially a theological & philosophical creed. The evidence for which is found within the beauty and necessity of the truths it conveys. This creed is that humans were created in such a way that they should be treated with dignity and respect. That we are responsible for what we do and should be kept to account for ourselves. That government does not grant us anything rather it creates laws to protect the great singular invisible law that God has built humans with a soul and any crime against the body is therefore a crime against God our maker, himself.
Not everyone wants to live this way. Freedom is difficult. This has become more evident with every generation of Americans. The difficulty with freedom is not in obtaining or establishing it, but rather sustaining it. This really is what we celebrate on the 4th day of the month of July every year: our freedom. We say thank you to the past and venerate their sacrifices. But the sacrament of July 4 is not a memorial only but rather a partaking of the truth that we ARE free. Government does not make us free. We are created free, and we designed to fight for and sustain that freedom.
But sadly despite being raised as an American in a foreign land these truths were not conveyed to me. I had to learn them myself after college. I had to pan through the silt of my lost identity and discover the beauty of American freedom on my own. But what makes this so painfully ironic is that I grew up in a free country that is free because of the United States and yet I was not given the vision there and simultaneously most of my US born and raised peers have yet to see the beauty of this vision. Often they do not even seem to have an inkling of the vision. It’s covered by so much shame and embarrassment over privilege and enhanced by a total lack of anything approaching a coherent view of the world.
But what I now find so beautiful is that during all those years I spent not celebrating the 4th of July the 4th of July was being celebrated over me every single day and I never had a clue. The Filipino flag contains 4 colors. 3 of those colors are red, white, and blue. In their Declaration of Independence we find out why:
“the colors of Blue, Red, and White, commemorating the flag of the United States of North America, as a manifestation of our profound gratitude towards this Great Nation for its disinterested protection which it lent us and continues lending us.”
Disinterested protection! We were not colonizers. We were liberators. And all the while freedom was blowin in the wind and I just couldn’t see.
As a Christian and a rational person I know that America is not here to stay. All countries fail. All empires crumble. But in her Bones America sees life as a glorious tragic struggle of rugged hope. As America slowly becomes a welfare state, exchanging freedom for comfort, we live out Tolkien’s Long Defeat.
People of faith are best suited for this struggle because the Elohim of Yisrael and Yeshua the Mashiach promised their followers suffering. We were promised a long defeat. And so were Americans. Not because America is a Judeo-Christian nation but because our founders were no fools. Benjamin Franklin promised us a Republic, but only if we could keep it. They never said it would be easy or that we deserved any of it. The task of freedom is the same one that the mysterious writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews ends his epic speech with:
“Therefore, to sanctify the people by his own blood, Jesus also suffered outside the camp. We must go out to him, then, outside the camp, bearing the abuse he experienced. For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come.”
The hope of things unseen is the basis of our struggle and we must leave safety to live in this hope. We must go outside of the safe places into the wilderness, to Golgotha, the place of the skull and die to ourselves if we want to be free.
We can either die to our selfish self importance and learn to live in virtuous freedom again or as Lincoln told the young men at the Lyceum we will die anyway but instead it will be suicide.
Whatever your sex or race, it does not matter. You are created free. You can either embrace it or give it up for comfort. These are the days we were given, what we will do with them is up to us. It is not up to the Potus or the Scotus. It is up to US.
God bless America.
Published in Politics
You gave me chills. Happy Fourth.
Wonderful post. Thank you.
My high school students use a Latin textbook that was written at the end of WWII. It contains passages like this:
I am not sure why I see some of the text repeated. (Did the fireworks jog something in my computer???) But this is a lovely, lovely post.
I had a friend in graduate school who was hell bent on showing how Americans were racists in regards to Filipinos–and we were, I suppose, at the end of the Spanish American War–but that still requires greater context. One still must look at McKinley’s intent when shifting his power against Emilio Aguinaldo. It is not without paternalism or broken bonds, but one must also acknowledge the final acts as the US removed itself from the picture on a July 4th after WWII… as promised.
It’s all a little more complicated than my fellow student said, I think, but I didn’t know anything at all about the Philippines when she spoke.
I love knowing now about why the Filipino flag looks as it does. Thanks.
Thank you Lois.
I see the text repeated as well…it wasn’t like that earlier. I’ll see if it’s something I can fix.
Part of the complications with the Filipino American war was that several Euro powers that were looking for new colonies showed up as the Spanish left. The US really did not want to free the Filipinos and then allow them to become colonized again so they wouldn’t leave Manila Bay until the Dutch or Germans or whoever left. Then the war itself was sparked due to the occupation itself which was not extensive, but it was constant especially in the Bay. Filipinos were having their own elections within a decade of the start of that war. But more importantly than that the US consciously wanted to prove that they would be faithful to our founding principles and so they immediately sent missionaries to teach them English. This was deeply significant because the Spanish did not do this (Tagalog is probably 30-40% Spanish) because they did not want the Filipinos to be able to trade outside of their control. The US wanted exactly the opposite. They wanted them to have access to the other nations around them for trade and commerce. And that’s pretty much what happened. And ironically enough even though English is still the language of instruction there to this day the period from their freedom to WWII is essentially a golden age for Tagalog poetry and literature.
They celebrate their Independence Day from Spain on June 12 and July 4 is called something like Filipino American Friendship day.
Also Aguinaldo was the first president of a constitutional republic in Asia.
So yeah I agree that there isn’t much “racism” there.
***This is where it starts over
AC, Wonderful post; hope you or the editors can fix that , then I’ll mail to others that also appreciate it, including some former expats like me.
I’m gonna try to fix it now. That’s super weird.
Thank you guys, to everyone who liked this or appreciated it. I think its fixed now. I really don’t know what happened…happy independence day!
I think there was some in that age per the “white man’s burden” that became a “thing” from what I understand, but yeah. We were not the same sort of oppressors that other colonizing powers could be/would have been. I think the intention was always in line with “nation building.”
The student was married to a Filipino, to be fair, but her dissertation was very in line with the grievance narratives that academia seem to love at the moment.
That’s an interesting note on language… I am glad that American/Filipino Friendship Day is still acknowledged.
It’s also interesting to hear that the majority of Filipinos are not full of resentment against Americans. I mean, this always comes up in my own classroom when we get to them and to Hawaii. (I don’t want to dismiss how some people feel, but I am not an expert on either of these places.)
I had a kid a year or so ago who wrote a research paper on how Filipinos make up a disproportionate number of nurses in the United States, which was tied in a strange way to this early relationship…
It’s amazing how history’s puzzle pieces end up connecting in the present.
My grandfather’s physician was in the military in the Philippines and survived the Death March and years in a camp wasting away, giving what little care he could and seeing so many die. He wrote and published his memoirs of this shortly before his own death. It is truly a harrowing tale.
For certain. My son is a 2nd Lt. When he was in ROTC in college, he twice ran the Bataan March Memorial Run in White Sands. I went to support him the last year, and the morning was full of men and women in waves of green. (Many are in small teams that take on this challenge together.)
I started crying when the general opening the race had all these servicemen/women stand at attention for several minutes as he read the names of the Death March veterans who had passed away since the last race. We were still on the edge of dark, and the silence was absolute despite the thousands of people.
Anyway a handful of survivors from the actual Death March always go to this event, and there was a group of like 5-7 who greeted all the runners at the end… the tiny men who looked like giants to me as they leaned on their canes or sat with blanket folded across their legs in their wheelchairs and gave high fives and handshakes. I could not help but wonder how much longer they will be able to attend.
For serious athletes who love history, the military, and the country, this is a wonderful event worth doing.
I see it’s fixed now. Good! BTW, I really like your succinct Philosophy statement in your Profile page; would you mind if I borrowed it?
I really don’t know about Hawaii. I don’t understand that situation at all. But if Filipinos have developed an SJW attitude towards the US it’s new or it was essentially kept in their universities.
Yes I heard the so called helping our “little brown brothers” narrative as well…and the truth is that free societies require Faith (check) Freedom (check) and Virtue (this is not so clear, not to the degree it was in the early US). There is a great deal of kleptocracy in the Philippines. This comment is going to be too long and will require essentially another post about the significant non racial differences between the 13 colonies and the Philippines. I’ll try to have that up tonight and I’ll tag you in it.
Well I’m pretty sure I stole it from Os Guinness and Eric Metaxas stole it from Os as well (and wrote a book about it) and Os did a dirty British trick and stole it from the founders who stole it from the Bible and the Greeks and Romans…so steal away. If youre going to steal, steal gold. That’s all I steal…and I steal a lot of gold. ;)
Are these still available in print? That would be amazing and important reading.
Yes they do! Lots of Doctors come to America and become nurses. We live in Caliphateornia and my wife is a nurse. According to her (and while she’s conservative socially she does not care nearly as much about politics as I do, so she’s relatively indifferent to Trump but didn’t like Hilbot at all) the Filipinos she works with were avid Trump supporters. Because they come here legally and assimilate. They become Americans. And by that I do not mean white. I mean they believe in what Os Guinness calls the golden triangle of freedom…in other words they’re better Americans than Trump (I voted for him which means I can say whatever I want about im…within the reasonable limits of free speech). Pinoy Americans are still very much themselves. They still go to Catholic Churches or Iglesia ni Christo, they still avidly follow the PBA (Philippine Basketball Association) and the NBA (similar to an American like me who follows MLS and EPL) but like real Americans they expect to work hard for everything they get and do not want charity that they do not actually need. All this adds up to a deep antithesis to illegal immigration, especially in Caliphateornia where state tax payers pay for the public education (all the way through 4 year colleges I found out recently) and their health care, unemployment whatever. I actually wouldn’t have a problem with open borders if there were no government entitlements and we re ammend the constitution to remove income tax. But since Narnia apparently has no inlets on our continent that’s a world I’ll never see.
I didn’t vote for him, but I can say whatever I want about him, too, since… you know… freedom. :D
Hawaii would almost certainly have become someone else’s colony, but it was taken over with a queen dethroned by a contingent of marines acting on behalf of expats during the age
of empire. I have a friend who grew up in Hawaii, and when I ask about this, she says some resentment is real. However, it’s stoked for political reasons by people who understand “separating” from the US–which is still a talking point in certain circles–would be counterproductive and silly. Talking about the mainland as oppressive? It forgives any problems the state has.
I’m glad to hear that Filipinos in general do not have this attitude about the US.
That would be great!
Sorry! I started writing that night and other things came up, and kept coming up. I will get to it soon I swear.