"Filipinos are excellent." We compete, we excel and we win. We are not ready for this. In terms of the greatest Filipinos who have contributed so much to the development of our country we have stopped recording at Rizal's generation, as if our soil never generated the likes of them again and the best we can ever aspire to be now if we ever still want to be excellent are to be media-trained, palatable athletes and actors.
Filipino scientists? They have to only come in public service ads and free-use images or clips where they always have to have just one look: wearing some variant of lab coats and lab goggles examining a test tube and/or a more rural preservationist attire examining mangroves at some anthropology site. Then, that's it.
The best and greatest Filipinos our minds can apparently handle now post-Rizal are sanitized, generic looking "do-gooders" who ascribed fully like trained seals to some prescribed way of being. That or be bohemian, free-living looking athlete or vlogger.
"Filipinos are kind." To whom exactly? Not to the best among us apparently.
