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Casting Away the Myth of Filipino Insensitivity
(A Journey from Taingang-Kawali to Co-op Voluntarism)
Taingang Kawali is Filipino idiom for an insensitive or unresponsive person, nagta-taingang kawali, nagbibingi-bingihan (feigning hardness of hearing), to evade responsibility.
Voluntary and Open Membership – Co-operatives are voluntary organizations, open to all persons able to use their services and willing to accept the responsibilities of membership, without gender, social, racial, political, or religious discrimination. - First Co-op Principle, International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) Statement on the Co-operative Identity, 1995.
The Filipino kawali is certainly more durable and versatile than its western counterpart. Name any dish from the cookbook and the Filipino kawali will readily respond without reservation, unlike the western teflon-coated pan which is good only for frying burger, franks, French fries, ham and egg.
The perceived insensitivity on the part of the colonized Filipinos is more a manifestation of prudence than lack of valor. Once the Filipino propagandists in the land of the colonizers and the Filipino masses in the colonized land saw the fullness of time for the people’s revolution, then the colonizers readily recognized the true character of the Filipino.
The Filipino kawali and the Filipino people are both victims of ignorant if not malicious appreciation. The Filipino kawali is as responsive as the Filipino youth who vowed loyalty in the service of the motherland. Voluntarism was a most sacred criterion to enter such service and joining the most revered revolutionary force – Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan.
For a people with such a tradition of heroism and readiness to offer the supreme sacrifice for the cause that really counts, the Journey from Taingang-Kawali to Co-op Voluntary and Open Membership should be a relatively easy course. This Co-op principle is more than just an organizational membership principle, it is a social principle entreating people’s solidarity. In the words of the writers of the ICA centennial report commenting on this principle: Since its earliest years, the co-operative movement has sought to bring together people of different classes; indeed, that is what distinguished it from some other nineteenth century ideologies...(it) has encouraged people of different political allegiances and ideologies to work together. In that sense, it has tried to transcend the traditional ideologies that have created so much tension, unrest, and warfare in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (ICA, 1995, p.15).
Even a desperate people in the thick of the struggle to re-establish its true cultural, social, and economic sovereignty should recognize the premium that other sovereign nations place in the peaceful way of achieving such sovereignty. The Co-op principle of voluntary and open membership appropriately provides us a guiding light.
