Mayor Rodrigo Duterte in 1998 talking about the rape and murder of an Australian lay missionary in Davao City to the delight of his audience. Photo: screen grab of YouTube video

fter being excoriated first by social media, then by the general public, for a boorish and insensitive remark he made in 1989 that happened to be caught on video, Davao City mayor and presidential candidate Rodrigo Duterte finally admitted it was a mistake. At first he tried to justify it as a seemingly vulgar joke due to his poor and humble upbringing. But a cursory check into Duterte's "humble" origins will show that they weren't as humble as he'd like us to believe. His parents could afford to send him to Catholic private schools. He just managed to get himself expelled from at least one of them.

Those who've seen the video (we've posted a LINK here) will notice that Duterte's joke though indeed insensitive and in bad taste appears well received by his audience. Even the female standing behind him on stage found it funny enough to react. In fact, crude, insensitive, and vulgar jokes are commonplace in the Philippines. We simply find boorish, dehumanizing, and crude jokes funny. Just watch our locally produced TV shows where you see scantily-clad females gyrating on stage for no apparent reason. Or young children forced to perform sexually provocative dance moves on the air. Go watch Pilipino movies which, except for a handful, are generally badly produced and in poor taste. The funny thing is that the Philippines was making movies long before any of its Southeast Asian neighbors were. But instead of leading the pack, the country seems to have been left in the dust.

Here's the problem

We're too tolerant a society. We tolerate mediocrity, we tolerate vulgarity, and we tolerate bad taste. We also tolerate lewdness, and we tolerate shoddy quality. The end result of all this tolerance is that over the years, we've come to accept that almost anything done by Filipinos is—for one reason or another—second-rate.

This all has to change. And thanks to the internet and social media, Filipinos from all walks of life are now being called out on their shortcomings. It's taken almost thirty years but thanks to the recently surfaced video, Duterte is now being taken to task for what he said back in 1989. We need to continually call out Filipinos who behave like buffoons in public; businessmen who produce substandard products; and directors and producers who make "lousy" TV shows and movies. It is now incumbent upon all of us—the pioneering generation of social media, to start turning things around.

There was a time not so long ago when Japan was known for producing cheap, poor-quality products. It was Akio Morita the founder of Sony, as well as other like-minded Japanese industrialists who found that situation unacceptable and decided to change things. And they succeeded. Today, "made in Japan" signifies topnotch quality. That kind of change can happen as well for the Philippines. We all just need to keep our guard up and continually call out those among us who fall below the "new" Filipino standards. Published 4/22/2016