Even while in Japan, our president continues to lambast the USA. That is his choice. With due respect, there are many things in life that are easier said than done. The sage once wrote a very apt line about that immutable principle: "If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, then chapels would have been churches, and poor men's cottages, princes' palaces." Yes, it is very easy for the president, after signing multiple bilateral agreements with China, involving supposed billions of alleged grants and investments, and after announcing the landmark normalization of the Philippine-Sino foreign relations, to say goodbye to the USA. It was an auspicious, and I should say, with due respect, an audacious political statement, that is too hard, if not impossible, to implement.
The US-Philippine relations, or should we say, the Philippine-US relations, to be politically correct, has survived more than 116 years of ups and downs. There had been bad times, but there were more good than bad. The best gift that the Americans gave us was the gift of education. The Spanish conquistadores invaded our land, enslaved our people, ravaged our natural resources, and raped our women. But they never educated us. They were afraid to empower our ancestors and forefathers, fearing that many would follow the footsteps of Jose Rizal who, being educated in Spain and in other nations in Europe, came home with liberal and progressive ideas as freedom, human rights, and liberty. We should read and reread the "Noli" and "Fili" of Rizal in order to understand that.
The Americans sent a shipload of volunteer teachers aboard the SS Thomas, which took the ship several weeks to cross the Pacific (there were no commercial flights back then). They became the Thomasites who educated our folks and taught us reading, writing and arithmetic, and the fundamentals of civics, and good manners. The Thomasites braved malaria-infested frontiers in our thousands of islands in order to bring education to our natives and indigenous Filipinos. These are the legacies that neither Spain, much less China can ever approximate in value and lasting empowering effects upon our people. And these are the long-term legacies that we cannot just throw away into the dust bins of history.
Then, the Americans taught us the fundamentals of freedom, of liberty, of democracy, in the traditions of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. They instilled in the hearts and minds of our forefathers the importance of patriotism and nationalism, the value of serving one's country in the manner of George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and Alexander Hamilton. They mentored us on the basics of modern governance, in the style of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. They made us imbibe abiding commitment to equality, fraternity, and the brotherhood of men under the fatherhood of God, in the manner of Dr. Martin Luther King. China never attempted, despite the proximity of our land, to give us such nuggets of legacies. Japan devastated our land, killed our fathers, and made sex slaves out of our women. Our president should vent his anger on them. The Americans have had their excesses but there were not as despicable.