The coconut leaves were making that restless sound I remember from home—the dry, rapid clatter of fronds rubbing against one another when the wind starts pushing harder than usual. I could almost smell the damp earth after rain, the faint salt in the air, the smoke from somebody cooking nearby, and hear a motorbike passing somewhere beyond the trees. In my memory, the coconut trunks leaned with the wind the way they always had, thin and impossibly tall, bending far enough to make you wonder how they had not snapped years ago. As a child, I never thought much about it. Coconut trees bent. That was simply what they did. They yielded to the weather and stood upright again when it passed. It was survival, not surrender. Years later, thousands of miles from the Philippines, I read a line in the news about bending the law, and suddenly that old image of coconut trees did not feel quite so innocent.

I read the remark twice. Senator Erwin Tulfo had said that sometimes the law had to be “bent” to please the people. I understood the anger surrounding the issue. I understood why Filipinos wanted accountability, especially when the conversation involved allegations surrounding public funds and flood-control projects. There are few things more insulting than asking people to endure another flood while questions hang over money supposedly meant to protect them from one. But the phrase stayed with me, and the longer I sat with it, the more disappointed I became. There are many things in the Philippines I am happy to see bend. Coconut trees. Traffic rules when somebody is trying to reverse a jeepney into a space clearly designed for half a jeepney. Family dinner times when an auntie says, “Five minutes,” and everyone knows this may refer to any period between now and tomorrow. The law should not belong on that list.

Perhaps that reaction comes from loving the country too much to be casual about the things that repeatedly wound it. The Philippines is extraordinarily easy to love from a distance. Put Batanes beneath a blue sky and it looks like someone became overenthusiastic with the landscape settings. Stand beside the turquoise water in Palawan and even the most committed cynic becomes briefly poetic. Walk through the rice terraces of Ifugao and it is difficult not to think about the generations of hands that shaped those mountains long before any of us started arguing on Facebook. Cebu carries its own kind of familiarity for me—the heat against the skin, the sound of tricycles and motorbikes, the smell of food travelling farther than the person cooking it intended, voices crossing from one house to another as though walls were merely polite suggestions.

But my affection for the Philippines has never depended on beaches or postcards. It lives much more stubbornly in its people. In the mother stretching one meal so everyone gets something. In the neighbour who knows precisely who came home late last night but will also be the first person carrying a basin into your house when the floodwater comes. In the nurse leaving for another country because the salary back home cannot carry the family far enough. In the fisherman awake before sunrise. In students studying beneath whatever light is available. In jeepney drivers negotiating roads, traffic and human impatience before most of the city has properly opened its eyes. Filipinos possess an almost unreasonable capacity to make room for humour even when life has not provided particularly good material.

That resilience is beautiful. It is also something I have become wary of romanticising.

We praise Filipinos for surviving everything. Typhoons. Earthquakes. Poverty. Political scandals. Inflation. Broken systems. Delayed assistance. Questionable infrastructure. Family group chats. Somewhere along the way, resilience became one of the words we use most proudly about ourselves. And yes, we should be proud of it. But a population being exceptionally good at surviving failure should never become permission for institutions to keep failing them.

A coconut tree bends because the alternative may be breaking in the storm. A citizen should not have to spend a lifetime learning the same technique.

That was what disappointed me most about the idea of “bending” the law to please people. Public anger can be justified and still require lawful answers. Wanting justice quickly does not make people unreasonable. Wanting allegedly stolen money recovered, wrongdoing investigated and officials held accountable is hardly an outrageous expectation. In fact, it should be the minimum. But the very frustration people feel with weak institutions is exactly why the rule of law matters. If justice already feels inconsistent, making the law more negotiable cannot be the cure.

The temptation is understandable. Legal processes can move painfully slowly. Anyone who has dealt with bureaucracy knows that the phrase “please allow processing time” has occasionally tested the outer limits of Christian patience. When public outrage is high, procedure can feel like obstruction. People want action, not another committee, another hearing, another stack of documents travelling through offices at the speed of a sleepy photocopier.

But impatience with the system should lead us to strengthen the system, not teach it how to bend.

Once leaders become comfortable with the idea that the law may be adjusted because the public wants a particular outcome, an uncomfortable question follows: what happens when the public wants something unjust? What happens when the person deciding how far the law can bend is someone we do not trust? What happens when “for the people” becomes useful language for actions that eventually serve somebody else?

That is the trouble with shortcuts. They tend to look attractive when they are taking us somewhere we already wanted to go.

The rule of law matters precisely because it is supposed to restrain power when emotions, popularity and political convenience are pulling in another direction. Laws can be changed. Bad laws should be challenged. Procedures can be improved. Systems that move too slowly should be reformed. None of that requires pretending rules should become optional whenever following them becomes inconvenient. If legislation needs changing, change it through the mechanisms designed for that purpose. Debate it. Amend it. Replace it. Make it better. That is different from deciding that the destination is good enough to excuse whichever route gets us there fastest.

I found myself thinking about the difference between flexibility and integrity. Filipinos understand flexibility extremely well. We improvise because we often have to. A broken umbrella gets repaired. A container finds a second life. A plastic chair with one questionable leg remains in service far longer than engineering standards would recommend. Brownouts become candlelit dinners whether anyone planned romance or not. A recipe adapts because one ingredient is unavailable and somebody’s mother insists hers is better anyway. We are resourceful because circumstances have demanded it from us repeatedly.

But there are places where resourcefulness should not be necessary.

People should not have to improvise justice.

They should not have to rely on who shouts loudest, who trends online or which politician is currently popular. They should not need to wonder whether the same law will produce one outcome for the powerful and another for everyone else. A democracy cannot ask citizens to trust institutions while treating consistency as an optional feature.

Perhaps that is why corruption in the Philippines feels especially painful to me. It exists beside such astonishing beauty and such extraordinary human effort. A country so rich in natural resources still has families worrying about the next meal. A nation that produces brilliant nurses, teachers, engineers, artists and workers sends so many of them abroad because opportunities at home remain uneven. Communities survive floods and then hear allegations involving projects supposedly designed to prevent those floods. People work, remit money, pay taxes and follow rules while repeatedly being asked for patience whenever accountability becomes inconvenient.

There is a particular exhaustion in watching ordinary Filipinos do their part while wondering whether those entrusted with public money have done theirs.

And yet, disappointment has never made me love the Philippines less. If anything, it is because I love it that disappointment comes so easily. Indifference would be simpler. I could admire the beaches, eat the food, complain affectionately about traffic and leave politics to someone else. But patriotism that only survives beautiful sunsets is not much use to a country.

To love somewhere is also to notice where it hurts.

It is to refuse the comforting idea that criticism is disloyalty. Wanting better governance does not mean hating the Philippines. Demanding accountability does not insult the country. The insult is expecting its people to settle for less because they have become so skilled at enduring it.

I still think about those coconut trees. Their strength has never come from pretending the wind is not there. They move because they recognise its force. Their trunks curve. Their leaves thrash. Storms strip away fronds and sometimes entire trees fall. But the ones that remain do something important: they bend without becoming unrooted.

Maybe that is where the metaphor should end.

Governments need flexibility. Laws need mechanisms for amendment. Leaders need enough humility to recognise when systems are failing the people they serve. But flexibility without roots is simply convenience, and a law that changes according to whoever applies the most pressure begins to resemble something other than justice.

The Philippines deserves better than that.

It deserves leaders who can hear public anger without turning governance into applause seeking. It deserves institutions strong enough to punish corruption without abandoning due process. It deserves laws enforced consistently enough that ordinary people do not have to wonder whether justice depends on wealth, influence or surname. It deserves flood-control projects that control floods, public funds that remain public and officials who remember that government service is supposed to contain significantly more service than spectacle.

Most of all, Filipinos deserve to be known for more than their ability to survive whatever happens to them.

I want a country where resilience is still admired, but not constantly required.

I want the child flying a plastic-bag kite to grow up believing the rules protect her too. I want the nurse considering work abroad to have genuine choices. I want the fisherman leaving before dawn to know that the taxes hidden inside every purchase eventually return as functioning roads, hospitals, schools and protection from disasters. I want bayanihan to remain a beautiful expression of community, not the unofficial replacement for institutions that failed to arrive. And perhaps that is why the word “bend” unsettled me so much. I know what bending looks like back home.

I have watched coconut trees lean almost impossibly far beneath a storm and still remain attached to the earth. I have watched Filipinos do much the same thing—adjusting, rebuilding, laughing, praying and finding another way forward because standing perfectly still was never an option.

But people should not have to keep bending because their institutions do.

The next time I picture those coconut trees, I know exactly what I want to remember about them. It is not how far they can lean. It is that beneath all that movement, their roots still hold. The tree can bend.

The law should know where it stands.

Patriotism, with its eyes open,
Anj 🇵🇭