1. You have a daughter, she goes to a school. Her English or Filipino textbooks are riddled with errors, so much so that it would seriously affect her language skills in future. When you raise the issue to the teacher, she says she can’t do anything about the texts the school buys, so you bring it up at the PTA or Principal’s meeting, and they just tell you to ignore the mistakes and get a tutor to help your child. Do you mean to tell me humility would be to accept that and not raise a stink? Would you be so humble so that you would instead compromise your child’s education because it was uncomfortable pointing out factual errors and shoddy quality?

2. You are getting married. You reserve the ballroom of a hotel by the bay. You have a faxed confirmation of the date. Then two days before, the secretary calls to tell you there has been a mistake, you don’t have the ballroom after all. Do you mean to tell me you wouldn’t raise a stink? You would just be “humble” and take this as your station in life, and have your 200 guests end up at a hastily reserved alternative location, even after you have distributed your invitations?

3. You are in line at the grocery, and you are in hurry because your very ill mother is in the hospital and awaits your return with adult diapers. But suddenly, two people cut into the line a few people in front of you, and they have 60+ items in their cart each. Do you mean to tell me “humility” is allowing them to do so? Even if it means that your own mother would be placed in prolonged discomfort?

4. You are at church, and you place PHP100 in the collection basket, and the person next to you, instead of contributing, reaches in and pulls out some PHP500 in money, apparently stealing it. Do you not tell them to put it back? Or ignore what you see and just let it go? And when he denies that he took it, would you then just let it go and not raise a stink, when you know that what he did was wrong, regardliess of the difficulties he faces, or the reason why he needs the money so badly, even if a life or death situation?

5. At work, you and a colleague are writing a major report for a client. You do all your work and it is documented and properly sourced. You realize minutes before presenting the work that the portion done by your colleague is almost fully plagiarized and some of the data stolen from another study. Do you look the other way, or confront the person and suffer the consequences of not delivering the report on time?

I could go on and on. In instances when folks do something clearly wrong, lying, stealing, cutting in line, etc… I think it is almost your duty to say something. Because if you don’t, you could actually be condoning and encouraging that behavior.

Do you think when Cory Aquino was President and a newspaper columnist said during a coup attempt that the housewife had cowered under her bed, do you think she turned the other cheek and ignored that lie? Of course not, she responded firmly and with facts, by showing the world that there was NO SPACE under her bed and thus couldn’t have hid there and that the newspaper’s story was essentially libelous. And I believe she did sue for libel, and won.

I often find that religion clouds definitions such as humility to the point where people tend to use it as an excuse rather than in the truest sense of the word.

If you don’t get the picture from the examples above… there isn’t much I can do to convince you, and frankly, I wouldn’t want to spend any more time doing so. You are welcome to your opinions on how to define humility, or who is humble or not, but oddly, for someone who professes to be so disturbed by it, you seem to continue to read the blog. Then why keep coming back for repeated visits instead of focusing on reading other blogs that appear to be written by those with more humility? And since you reside in Singapore, I am pretty sure you are aware what efficient and competent service entails, from the government offices, to the retail sector, education, etc. And when you point out a something wrong service wise in Singapore, the response is often far quicker and more logical than it can be in the Philippines… Those who refuse to dissect an issue objectively often choose to focus on the peripherals, not the issue at hand. And the major issues at hand above was Maria’s email, which to her own admission:

1. Lied about who she was and where she studied and why she needed something
2. Then when she didn’t get the answer she wanted, resorted to uncalled for profanity of the foulest sort
3. When it was pointed out that what she did was wrong and there were very real potential consequences, she quickly backtracked and sought leniency
4. Doing research for someone else, is on its own already bordering on the grey area for a student
5. The person in question is an adult, not a child.

That is the crux of the matter. And the outcome, I thought, was extremely positive. But somehow, you failed to see that.