'Debt of gratitude for what? For reducing us into linguistic and cultural paupers?'

SABBATICAL NOTES. 23 JULY 2014. WEDNESDAY. N4. 
'Debt of gratitude for what? For reducing us into linguistic and cultural paupers?' 

[For Janine Go Dimaranan: a Tagalog who understands so many things, including the need to have a just and fair public policy on language and culture.]

THERE IS SOMETHING going on in the struggle for what is just and right in the Philippines. 

There is something going on in the need to correct the decades of linguistic injustice and cultural oppression in the country.

While the various ethnolinguistic groups are coming to their senses in fighting for their basic right to their languages and cultures--a right that a self-respecting nation should understand fully--some other people who are so comfortable in their fascistic mindsets are telling everyone that the non-Tagalog peoples owe theTagalog people a debt of gratitude for sharing their language to the rest of the nation.

No, this is not historically correct.

When you do not ask for help to live, you do not owe anyone a debt of gratitude.

When a language is imposed, that language owes the people a public confession and must, ask for forgiveness for its sins of commission.

And the sins are many. One of these is the reduction of all these non-Tagalog peoples to illiteracy: to being illiterates in their own languages and cultures.

To make the non-Tagalog peoples guilty of this illusory debt of gratitude is one of the most absurd fascistic claims ever rammed into the throat of a long-suffering non-Tagalog peoples.

This is triumphalism at its worst.

WPH/