We want to uplift the culture of Filipino - our respect to our elders, how we pray before we eat and sleep. These are things the younger generations tend to forget because of our exposure to other cultures.
It's time to respect the treaties our ancestors signed and care for our land, water, and cultures so that they remain healthy for our future generations.
I'm not against other cultures, but I believe what the Germans call a "leitkultur", a dominant culture that we should have, even in our constitution state, what our dominant culture is and that our laws should apply to that culture and to no other one.
The things that inform student culture are created and controlled by the unseen culture, the sociological aspects of our climbing culture, our 'me' generation, our yuppie culture, our SUVs, or, you know, shopping culture, our war culture.
Weren't we all crazy in our sleep? What was sleep, after all, but the process by which we dumped our insanity into a dark subconscious pit and came out on the other side ready to eat cereal instead of our neighbor's children?
Much of the rest of the world has already learned some English. They pretty much understand the American way of doing things, because our culture has been ubiquitous and has been the 500-pound gorilla in the global economy. But the world is far more interrelated than ever before, and no one culture can thrive without the knowledge of how to function in other cultures.
It's about something that I'm extremely passionate about: exploring other cultures, how Americans are perceived by other cultures and how we perceive other cultures through our worldview. I travel whenever I get an opportunity to do so, and I think this country is ready for a show on television that is bilingual and really puts front and center another culture, both as the protagonist and the antagonist.
Food is such an important part of our lives, and sometimes we tend to diminish the importance of that, because we rely on conveniences or because our lives are so complicated. We forget about those moments that we can actually share around the table with our family, with our friends, with our loved ones.
Why do we tell stories? It's because we want to connect to people, we want to tell them who we are, we want to tell them a story that affects us, that impacts us. And to help a young filmmaker doing a short or independent film is my testament, I think, is my desire to really make sure that our younger generations get passed along all the elders' experience and to literally have the image - to literally carry them on their shoulders and say, 'This is what the world is. This is how the world operates. Let me show you how.'
Our parents, our tribesman, our authority figures, clearly expect us to be bad or anti-social or greedy or selfish or dirty or destructive or self-destructive. Our social nature is such that we tend to meet the expectations of our elders. Whenever this reversal took place and our elders stopped expecting us to be social and expected us to be anti-social, just to put it in gross terms, that's when the real fall took place. And we're paying for it dearly.
Ask any parent what we want for our children, and invariably we say 'a better life.' To that end, we give our time, our sleep, our money, and our dreams, much as our parents did before us. We all want a better life for our children. But what we want for them ceases to matter if we leave them an unlivable world.
Some corporations don't want free markets, and they don't want democracy. They want profits. And they use our campaign finance system to loot our commons, to steal from our treasury, and the other shared resources of our community - the air, the water, the public lands, the wildlife, the things that belong to all of us that are held in trust for future generations. Corporations cannot act philanthropically in America.
We do not force things on people. That's not how we want things to eventuate. That's not how we want things to happen. We have what we consider to be, anyway, a respect for our form of government, a constitutional republic. We believe in it. We want legitimate mandates. We win an election, we want it to be because the genuine majority of people who share our beliefs. We don't think we accomplish anything by forcing something on people. But that's not the way the left looks at this at all. They can only get what they want by forcing it on people.
Our incapacity to comprehend other cultures stems from our insistence on measuring things in our own terms.
The test of our social commitment and humanity is how we treat the most powerless of our fellow citizens, the respect we accord to our fellow human beings. That is what reveals our true culture.
The food we eat is our identity. The youth of the nation must save our food culture and traditions. If not, it will affect future generations.
I think that cinema and the arts are central in our lives because we grow up and learn about the world through our exposure to stories. Parents use them as a tool to teach their children fundamental truths and values, much as adults can view them to gain exposure to cultures and individuals that they'd never be able to view in their own lives.