The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
They’ve been saying it for decades—Filipinos are resilient. Like it’s something to celebrate. Like surviving one tragedy after another is a mark of pride.
But no. Resilience isn’t a virtue anymore. It’s a wound we’ve learned to hide. It’s what happens when you’ve run out of choices.
I’ve lived long enough to see it—president after president, from the stories of my grandparents down to today—and the truth is, nothing really changes. I’m 65, and I’ve yet to witness a government that actually lifts the lives of ordinary people.
Every typhoon, every flood, every earthquake—the pattern’s the same. Relief goods for the cameras, promises for the headlines, and after that, silence. Band-aid after band-aid. Ayuda today, gutom bukas (hunger tomorrow). The same tired words, the same tired faces saying, “Magdusa muna kayo (Suffer yet).”
Politics has become a never-ending soap opera—Marcos versus Aquino, Aquino versus Marcos, now Marcos versus Duterte—and soon, who knows what’s next? It’s a carousel of revenge, power, and ego, while the rest of us cling to hope that never comes.
And here we are, the so-called resilient ones. We endure. We get up again and again, thinking that survival equals progress. We mistake temporary relief for compassion. We wear the word resilient like armor, when in truth, it’s just another name for abandonment.
Because that’s what it is—a word that hides the government’s failure, a convenient excuse for their lack of action. “Look, the people survived,” they’ll say. But survival isn’t the same as living.
Resilience has become their way of saying, “We don’t need to fix this—the people can handle it.”
It’s how they sleep at night. It’s how they wash their hands clean of responsibility.
We’ve been praised for our strength when what we really need is justice.
We’ve been called heroes just for enduring pain that should’ve been prevented in the first place.
Yes, we survive. Because what else can we do?
But until our leaders stop using our endurance as proof of their success, until they learn to serve instead of show off, we’ll remain what we’ve always been—resilient, but never free.
Resilience isn’t strength.
It’s the scar that never healed.
And we’ve been left to bleed for far too long.