Are we truly as free as we claim to be?

Every single June, the routine plays out exactly the same way. Our social media feeds turn into a sea of blue, red, and yellow emojis. We get the mandated, slightly sanitized infographics about the sacrifice of our heroes, and for about forty-eight hours, we collectively perform the role of a fiercely sovereign nation.

But is it really a celebration? Or just a collective coping mechanism? From what I see, it is merely a yearly distraction from a deeply uncomfortable reality: we are a population whose minds are still heavily occupied territory.

If you want to understand how deep the rot goes, you don’t need to read a dense sociology textbook.

Recently in Instagram, a couple of male models proudly coined a term for themselves — "halfies" and essentially argued that the Philippines needs their mixed genetics to survive and have value on the global stage.

Of course, the initial internet reaction was pure, unadulterated outrage. And fair enough. It’s easy to look at them and just see two arrogant grifters who realized they could take a massive shortcut to fame by exploiting our deepest national trauma for a paycheck and a title. They read the room, looked at our broken national psyche, and realized that in this country, playing up your proximity to whiteness is the ultimate cheat code.

The truly horrifying thing about that whole drama isn't their arrogance. It’s the realization that, what if—they’re right?

They were right about how desperate we are. They didn’t invent the toxic hierarchy—they just audited our society, realized we are pathologically obsessed with foreign validation, and handed us the bill. They knew that if you drop someone with a Western accent and a lighter passport into this culture, a massive segment of the population will instinctively bow down.

So, sure, get mad at them on social media. But let’s not waste all our energy on two clout-chasing pageant boys when the exact same systemic disease is sitting right on your bathroom counter.

Walk down the cosmetic aisle of any supermarket or convenience store in this country right now. What do you see?

It’s an endless, suffocating wall of whitening soaps, peeling agents, and bleaching creams. We are a tropical people, perfectly engineered by evolution for a tropical sun, yet we have built a multi-billion-peso industry out of absolute self-hatred.

We are teaching our kids, from the moment they can look at a billboard, that their natural melanin is a genetic mistake they need to pay to fix. We scream about sovereignty on the streets, and then we walk straight into a store to buy a bottle of our own inferiority complex.

And it doesn’t stop at skin tone. We’ve successfully weaponized language to keep the internal colonial structure alive and well. If you speak English with a polished, corporate Western accent, you’re instantly stamped as intelligent and elite.

But if someone speaks English with a thick, heavy provincial accent? They are immediately relegated to being the punchline of a cheap midday television show or mocked in a classroom. We are so deeply insecure about who we are that we take the language of the people who conquered us and use it to build invisible social ladders to look down on our own neighbors.

When you step back and look at the bigger picture, how do we even define a successful life here?

For the vast majority, success is almost never about building something sustainable on our own soil. It’s about escaping it. Our highest systemic ambition is to work for a foreign boss, to answer phone calls from across the ocean in the middle of the night, or to pack a suitcase and leave this place behind entirely.

We have been conditioned to believe that our own land is fundamentally, permanently barren.

Even our education system is rigged to keep us looking upward and outward. We spend years mastering Western political theories and memorizing European histories, while treating our own pre-colonial roots like a footnote—just some primitive myths to get through before the "real" history started when Magellan got lost.

We celebrate the day the Spanish left, yet we keep their exact social hierarchy alive and well in our corporate boardrooms, our media casting calls, and our political dynasties. The closer you look to the former masters, the higher your social currency climbs.

This brings us to the ultimate paradox of modern Filipino culture: the desperate hunger for the "Foreign Reaction."

A foreign YouTuber eats a plate of adobo and says it's "not bad"? National celebration in the comments saying “#proudpinoy.”

A Hollywood celebrity mentions Manila in a passing line of a movie? Front-page news.

A random Westerner reacts to a local singer? Millions of views overnight.

It’s pathetic. We are totally blind to our own intrinsic worth until someone with a lighter passport decides to validate it for us. We are a nation begging for a nod of approval, a foreign award, or a mixed-blood savior just to feel like we actually exist on the global stage.

Let’s disabuse ourselves of the myth.

True independence isn't a piece of paper signed in 1898. And it’s definitely not just replacing a white governor-general with a brown politician who wears a beautifully embroidered barong while robbing the national treasury just the same.

Right now, our freedom is nothing more than a legal fiction. Why? Because we are still utterly terrified of looking into the mirror and actually liking the face that looks back at us.

We keep begging for a seat at a global table that was specifically designed and rigged to make us feel small from the very beginning. We are so focused on trying to fit into their boxes that we are entirely oblivious to the fact that we have the culture, the talent, and the resources to just build our own.

Until we stop treating our own heritage like a disease that needs a foreign cure, we are just playing dress-up in a free country. We’re just standing there on the global stage—clutching a flag with one hand, and holding a bottle of bleach in the other.

The Frontman