Visa for real

If I had applied a visa back then, would I have gotten one?

I remember watching an independently-produced Filipino film, La Visa Loca, almost two years ago. It depicted every Filipinos’ dream of going abroad and hardships in acquiring a visa, any visa at that. Sometimes people opt to desperate measures just to be able to get a visa…selling family belongings, sometimes heirloom, loaning money from different people, and even doing piety rituals to seek God’s or any saint’s intervention in granting them their ultimate wish: a visa for real!

As the movie progressed, you can’t help but identify with the characters and their plight. Even I would say, “I’d do everything just to get a visa to US or Europe”. I want to see the places that I see when I’m watching movies, or touch the snow, or go malling at Beverly Hills Drive, or see Manhattan at the Observation Deck of the Empire State Building, or walk on the Hollywood’s Walk of Fame and maybe glimpse a famous Hollywood celebrity…gosh, I want to experience everything. Oh, and Europe…Maybe then, after all, I’d find myself saying, “There’s no place like home.” Isn’t that just great?!

My parents didn’t get us visas back then, when everything could have been easier simply because they didn’t thought something would drive them to do so. I mean, Philippines’ economy was doing well 20 years ago. However, times have changed. Everything is not as it had always been. Jobs are becoming too elusive, employment sector is highly competitive, inflation rate is always rising and fluctuating, quality of life is being compromised, and politics is becoming more amorphous and corrupt beyond imagination.

So, why are many of us Filipinos dying to go get a visa? Tell me reasons why we shouldn’t…for the love of our motherland? for the younger generations’ sake? Well, we are the ‘younger generations’ and even us were not spared by those before us. Sometimes, retreating doesn’t mean lack of courage and will, it simply means, a refuge…a bargain with time.

Our time will come, we will all come back, and those that we fostered to rebuild our beloved country…as for now, do not condemn us for our desire and decision in fleeing this land…for we might lose the will to fight and just let the tides take us and die in despair and regrets.

One day, when I am at face to face with any consul for a visa interview, and he asks, “Why should I give you a visa?” I would look him into the eye and say, “You should give me a visa because I want to prove one thing…that upon seeing America, maybe fall in love with its irresistible charm and beauty, my love for my country and everything that it stands for, my family, friends, my home, my heritage, would prove to be stronger than a mere fascination of foreign land’s novelty and would lure me back to my one and only, Philippines.”