Singapore teaches us a lesson most Filipinos can’t hear over the sound of their own excuses: you don’t get spotless trains, clean streets, and a GDP per capita that makes your neighbors jealous by clutching every shred of “personal freedom” like a toddler hoarding candy. Singapore traded some of it in—cheerfully—for progress, order, and a government that doesn’t need to be shamed on TikTok to do its job.

You can’t chew gum in public? Boo-fucking-hoo. You can walk home at 2 a.m. without worrying some desperate creep is going to knife you for your phone. You can’t spray graffiti on the subway? Cry me a goddamn river. The MRT runs on time, so clean you could eat off the floor—though you won’t, because eating or drinking on the train is banned too. They don’t see that as oppression. They see it as standards.

Lee Kuan Yew took one look at Western-style democracy—pluralism, endless debates, and political gridlock that makes EDSA traffic look fast—and said, “No, thanks.” He didn’t gamble Singapore’s future on the mood swings of voters or the greed of short-term politicians with mistresses to feed and golf trips to pay for. He built a government like a Swiss watch: precise, disciplined, and if your “freedom” got in the way, it was gone before you could say “civil liberties.”

Now look at us. Post-EDSA, we strutted around yelling “Never again” like freedom alone would magically fix everything. Then we went right back to electing dynasties, celebrity clowns, and the same kleptocrats we swore we were done with. We turned democracy into a buffet for the same parasites, and every election, we go back for seconds. Thirty-nine years later, we’re still gridlocked—in traffic, in governance, in thinking—while Singaporeans have a national meltdown if a train is two minutes late.

We didn’t just shoot ourselves in the foot—we emptied the magazine, reloaded, and aimed at our own heads. And we did it freely. Gleefully. Because “at least we’re free,” even if most of that freedom is used to argue on Facebook, elect thieves, and defend the very chaos that keeps us poor. We gush about Singapore when we visit—post their spotless streets on Instagram, rave about their safety, marvel at their order—then fly home and protect the same political circus that ensures we’ll never have it. It’s like envying your neighbor’s mansion while insisting your own roof should stay a tarp “because democracy.”

They gave up some freedom and got a first-world country. We clung to all of ours and totally fucked ourselves—with enthusiasm, confetti, and a marching band. And frankly, we fucking deserve the shithole we created ourselves.

We deserve the potholes that swallow your car whole. We deserve the brownouts that happen in the middle of the workday like it’s still 1978. We deserve the endless jeepney traffic because no politician wants to fix transport if it means losing votes. We deserve the floods that turn Manila into Venice every rainy season because we vote for clowns who’d rather cut ribbons than build drainage. We deserve the hospitals where you bring your own syringe, the police who moonlight as bodyguards for warlords, the internet so slow it should be classified as a humanitarian crisis. We deserve all of it because we keep choosing it, year after year, election after election, pretending that “freedom” means never having to grow the hell up as a nation.

We deserve the poverty statistics we ignore, the brain drain we encourage, the corruption we laugh off like it’s some national inside joke. We deserve to watch our best and brightest leave for Singapore, for Canada, for anywhere that functions—while we stay home and defend the political garbage heap that chased them out.

Singapore got progress because they were willing to pay the price. We got decay because we refuse to pay anything but lip service. And the most galling part? We like it this way. Because it’s ours. Our chaos. Our corruption. Our shithole. Built by us, sustained by us, and protected by us every time someone suggests we deserve better.

But at least we have fucking “democracy.”