Lost in Quotation

Dear mouse,

Popular sayings or quotations can be attributed to more than one author. Oftentimes, it is just the introductory of the real idea that the speaker would like the convey.

Take for instance,"My country right or wrong".The quote has no other meaning but a blind loyalty, an ultranationalism without doubt.

A US Senator, Carl Schurz (1899) who commented " My country, right or wrong." could have been interepreted to mean - my son, guilty or not."

But his statement was cut short. The next sentence that was omitted, "When right to be kept right; when wrong to be kept RIGHT gave a completely different idea.

Manuel L. Quezon was known to have coined the saying," I prefer a government run like hell by Filipinos to a government run like heaven by Americans."

Many a time, statehood advocates and harsh critics of the governent blamed the former President for the economic quagmire we are in right now.

They foolishlly believed that US was going to make us an additional state and we would have been delisted from the third world economies, when all the while, Filipinos in the US at that time were never treated as equal in terms of rights-- not even decent human beings. As if this was not enough, there was even a law passed to prevent Filipinos from marrying Caucasian women for the reason that it could deprecate the quality of the next generation of the American race.

It seemed the statement of the first President was incomplete too. Something's lost in the quotation.

Let me quote Manuel Quezon III on the famous statement made by his grandfather and the sentence omitted.

"About 10 years earlier, a Filipino said basically the same thing: "I prefer a government run like hell by Filipinos to a government run like heaven by Americans."

It was a sound bite heard around the world. But what all too few recalled was the essential sentence that came next: "Because, however bad a Filipino government might be, we can always change it."

The Ca t sez:

The bottomline is no one is to blame but ourselves for our inability to change it.

The Ca t