Then we obtained the services of an airport taxi to take us to Quezon City, a huge suburb of Manila. I recalled that in the Philippines everyone is pleasant and helpful, even the street urchins and presumably even rebel guerrillas. Manila, from its centuries under Spain and its decades with America, was not completely Asian anymore, and yet not Western at all. It was its own place, sui generis, as the lawyers like to put it, a thing unto itself. And yet it is my proposition that it is less wounded than is widely reported and so supposed.
Corruption runs unchecked.
The gap between the impoverished masses and a thin layer of superwealthy grows ever wider. The economy is in steep decline. International investors have turned skeptical and taken their money elsewhere. This is a country in crisis. Stability, and even improvement, is manifest in many different ways.