12/06/2026
๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ | โThe creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.โ - George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945)
While the Philippines may technically be free, it is not truly and fully in a state of independence, but rather in a state of โin dependence.โ This Independence Day, our country is akin to an animal farm. For centuries, we were seen as mere livestock under the boots of cruel ownersโfrom the Spaniards, the Americans and the Japaneseโwho whipped our backs, branded our flesh, and milked our resources until we were hollowed out to the bone. Driven by desperation, we rose up; under the brilliant, cunning leadership of the pigs among us, we charged the farmhouse, broke our chains, and overthrew the humans because of their savage ways.
We believed that when the old masters fled, freedom would finally be ours. But look closely through the farmhouse windows today, past the smoke and the flying confetti of June 12, 1898, the pigs have grown fat, they have learned to walk on two legs, and they have become their own enemy, turning into the very owners they once taught us to hate. And outside in the mud, we, sheep, remain, chanting patriotic slogans we were fed, utterly enslaved and dependent on the pigs whom we are led by.
The tragedy of Philippine sovereignty is that it has always been treated as an animal bred for the slaughterhouse, to be beaten and to be sold. We rejoiced in the barnyard when the Spaniards went away, entirely blind that we had already been bought like common cattle to the next highest bidder. In 1898, the United States purchased our entire archipelago for a mere $20 million in the Treaty of Paris, replacing the brutal farmer with a sneaky butcher. Decades later, Imperial Japan marched into our pens, hoisting another flag of false prosperity while bleeding the nation dry. A question that remains unanswered needs to be asked, why do we romanticize a freedom that was taken away before it could even be achieved? We point to the calendar and celebrate the departure of the white men and the empires, yet we ignore the dark truth that the farm was never actually given back to the working animals. It was just passed around from one owner to the other.
To ensure the animals remain oblivious to its captivity, the ruling pigs deliberately starve the public educational system. Our leaders have allowed Philippine classrooms to rot to the core. According to the World Bank in 2022, the Philippines suffers from a 91% โlearning povertyโ rate, meaning nine out of ten 10-year-old Filipino children cannot read or understand a simple text. Approximately 18 million Filipinos who are graduates from the countryโs basic education system could be โfunctionally illiterate,โ as per the data from the Functional Literacy, Education, and Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS) conducted by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) in 2024. An uneducated flock is an obedient flock, unable to challenge its masters, easily swayed by historical distortion, and easily pacified by empty entertainment.
The foreign humans have left, but the local pigs have moved into the grand farmhouse, slept in the lush beds, and started drinking the wine of absolute power. Our politicians, who are bloated by corruption and feast on dynastic wealth, abuse their power to treat the Filipino electorate not as a proud citizenry, but as a submissive flock of sheep to be sheared at election time and left to starve for the rest of the year. This is reflected by the PSA in 2024, which reported that poverty incidence among the population officially stands at 15.5%, which means nearly 17.5 million Filipinos are trapped in deep poverty, struggling every day just to meet their basic food and non-food needs. This phenomenon has turned the halls of governance into the perfect hiding spot for elite thieves; here, high-ranking criminals roam freely with power, while a common animal stealing scraps just to survive is instantly thrown into a cage. They hand unsustainable cash handouts, conditioning the poor to view their basic human rights as benevolent gifts from an owner. We are fed just enough slop to keep us from rioting, but never enough to make us self-sufficient. Indeed, it is true when George Orwell stated, โAll animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.โ
Because we cannot think, we cannot break free from the ancient leashes that have caged our generations. The original leaders of our republic took to the battlefields to liberate our people from lack of education, poverty, and injustice. Yet today, more than a 100 years after the colonial flags were lowered, a massive segment of our population still needs liberation from those exact same problems. True independence has been completely slaughtered, replaced by a toothless annual ritual of empty nationalism where we boast about our freedom inside the very barns that confine us. We are in a cycle where history repeats itself precisely because the deep roots of our oppression were never uprooted from the pasture, the fences were just mended, and the old whips were handed over to new masters who were once just like us.
In the end, we must realize that we traded foreign owners for a local ruling class, while we remain as livestock gazing blindly through the glass. For too long we have slumbered while the clever elite pigs stripped the trees of its wood and left the soil without its leaves. The crops are withering and the hayfields are dry, yet we drown out our own hunger with a loud and patriotic sigh. We can no longer tolerate the fat, walking swine who wine and dine inside the farmhouse. We live in a nation where the pigs are followed by the herd, while the cries of the other animals are left unheard. To finally achieve true independence, we must first escape living in dependence.
๐๐ณ๐ต ๐ฃ๐บ ๐๐ข๐ญ๐ฆ๐ณ๐ช๐ฆ ๐๐ญ๐ญ๐บ๐ป๐ข ๐๐ถรฑ๐ฐ๐ป
