Star Matter

This makes me so sad and so angry.

Sad because my country is so… ravaged by corruption, so poor, so wracked by inequality, so hurt by the callousness of the government, so left alone to wither and die that we are selling off our women with our land. Our land was sold to the US soldiers when they put their military bases on our soil, our women sold so that businesses and towns may survive. Should the foreigners have children, they are abandoned and forgotten, left in abject poverty because their fathers do not claim them. We sell our land, our daughters, our souls, to foreigners so that we may survive, because literally, no one cares about the men, women and children starving in the countryside, breaking their backs to break even and to see the next day. We are forgotten, even by the so-called “friends” that we have—those very friends who placed their military bases on our land, who use our women, who leave their children, who expect us to call them “savior”.

And this makes me angry because even if they do the above, those that abuse still have the gall to laugh at us, to abandon us. They see a Filipina walking down the street and expect her to want the nearest white man there is. There won’t be any rape, because they want us anyway. To expect to be savior because Filipinas could use a green card to move to the US. They laugh at us here. And at home, Americans do not know about the historical ties with the Philippines. Our revolution from their rule is marked as an “insurrection” or an “uprising”— as if our independence was not paid for by blood. An American boy had the gall to tell my friend, “We saved you from the Spaniards!”

No, no you didn’t. You bought us from them. You literally bought us for $20,000,000 (20 Million) from the Spaniards.

We paid for our independence in blood and sacrifice, through concentration camps and guerrilla warfare. But one hundred years later, the US still has us in its grip.

It’s shit like this that lets them think we’re disposable, that we’re beneath them. Invite them with our women, who in the minds of men, are disposable. Invite them because the women can sell their bodies so that the children may eat. Because women are reusable, are things, are disposable. Never mind that you come from the body of a woman, that it is a woman that nurtures for 9months in her womb. She is still disposable.

And if she’s a Filipina, she’s a whore who wants nothing else but a green card and money to feed her family, so she’ll laugh and smile. After all, isn’t that what the sign would imply? Come here because our beaches are beautiful. Come here because our women are, too.

It angers me because US troops who come here feel like they have the right to treat our women like toys, like concubines who serve solely for their pleasure.

And it angers me even more because my country lets them.