Doing it with passion

Youth is synonymous with energy, and with it, the passion of doing things, of having  energy rush  for every new adventure.  The infant is bewildered with the world around him, the same sense of awe that drives him to experience anything new.  The unknown is always a source of adventure.

As a child, I watched my elder sister play hide-and-seek during full moon, in a place that had no electricity then.  When I was six, and my parents allowed me to play during full moon,  I counted the days the day right  after the full moon, the start of the wait  for  another moon cycle, so I could go out and be lost into  the night.

The river in our place caught my fascination that I would cut classes so I could swim in the then pristine waters.  One time, I brought along with me my two younger brothers, to swim, and when my father discovered it, he punished the three of us to kneel for hours before an altar.  But that never deterred me.  The wonders of the river always beckoned me, even with the punishment.

When we grow older, we tend to do things sans the element of adventure but of our ideas about the activity.  Having had previous experiences, we know already the feeling, and understood the reasons for the activity.  Somehow, we get detached from the activity because at the back of our mind is the mental picture of the activity.  We thus tend to be more cerebral than emotional when we tackle the activity. It is not   the heart that dominates but the reason why an activity has to be done.

When I became a lawyer, civic groups invited me, and joining is a must, as any lawyer should, if he intends to establish a network of friends who are prospective clients.  At the age of 25, months after passing the BAR exams, a prestigious fraternity opened its otherwise secretive gates for me to enter, the FREE MASON.  I was already in the venue where the “raising”  (or formal start of the initiation) was held,  but my heart was not beating fast for that fraternity – there was no fascination nor wonder in joining the group.  Before the gates were opened, I left hurriedly.

At the age of five, I was playing competitive chess.  I played for long hours every day, honing my skill, competing with players much older than me. I could then play chess in my mind. Every chess game was an adventure.  But when I was already playing top level chess, the passion suddenly went pfftt. The need to be a champion took away the adventure the game once had. Chess ceased to be an adventure but a duty to practice daily to be a champion. One day, I could not find in my heart the sense of adventure when I played chess.  The fire was spent. At the young age of 13, I stopped playing chess.

I tried golf, and shooting, and went competitive, and was quite successful. After learning the ropes of the game, the passion was just gone.

What caught my passion early on in my professional life was the handheld radio.  That was in 1993, when cell phones and internet were yet unheard of in our country.  There was thrill in talking to people from distant places, of dismantling the radio set to analyze its parts, and studying for the licensure exam for radio communicators.  That was the time when I designed, and made my own radio antennae to compete with other enthusiasts.  The passion lasted for almost three years.  It was so short but the radio group I founded swelled to 1,500 members that everyday there was always a birthday celebration I had to attend, or in some instances, to visit the sick, dying, or deceased member.  The cell phone crazed naturally supplanted radio communication but the friendship among the members last even up to today.

When I was thirty years old, I got injured in a basketball game that I was limping for almost six months.  Though the spirit was still throbbing for basketball yet the bones were becoming brittle and the muscles, atrophying.

Accidently, while recuperating from my injury, I saw a tennis clinic for beginners.  At first, I thought the game is easy until I borrowed a tennis racket and tried to hit the ball and never to hit one correctly until more than ten attempts.  Secretly, I trained on my own, at the wall of church.  That secret training, without my knowing it, defined my life – from 1996 up to the present, not only my life but that of my family and the people who have been involved in the tennis movement in this part of the region.

Admittedly, the passion for lawyering has always been burning inside. Despite the experiences of how justice can be bought, or squandered by the sheer ignorance of a judge, the court scene is always never the same; it is always something new, and therefore, a possible source of infinite wonder and awe. But the profession is just too taxing for the mind and body that already, I am thinking on going into another field – politics.

Tennis is another story.  Almost every day, when my lawyering schedule permits, my family and I would be in a tennis court, to play tennis, or just to talk and drink with tennis buddies who are like extended families to me already. Every time I play tennis, the passion is still burning.  Maybe, this too will not last.

When we engage in activities with child-like fascination, we often excel and are generally fulfilled. But the moment the passion is lost, we search for other concerns, a new experience  to explore, and to unravel its thrill – the search may be endless.

Happily though for me, my writing for passion still throbs inside, to chronicle the varied concerns I have devoted my time into.  May be the fire for writing will one day end, when my heart does not seek anymore for a new field, a concern, a sport, or an activity.  That time perhaps will coincide when the candle of life ends.

Arrogance of power

Who do not want power?  Juan de la Cruz?  Priests?  Politicians?

Juan de la Cruz wants power desperately.  He has suffered injustices for so long.  He could not even eat three times a day much more send his children to school. With power, his woes would be over.

The hierarchy of power in the Catholic Church, and other religions are very elaborate.  Subordinates are directed to observe blind obedience to the superiors.  After all, the superiors are held to be the vicars of Christ. Power is wielded so the apostolate may be propagated.

Politicians occupy positions of power.  They hold the reigns of the government.  With millions of constituents under them, they need the awesome and vast state powers so the common good may be promoted.

Power per se is not wrong.  Without it, there can be no control, no peace and order in the world, and even in the universe.  Can you imagine what happens to the cosmos if the fallen angel Lucifer were as powerful as God?

The problem sets in when there is disconnect between the ideal and reality.  This is particularly of strong significance in case of politicians because they wield the vast resources of the state.  Corporations may fall; religious sects may fold up.  But their effects are not as pernicious as the failure of politicians.

When politicians fall, and wield power in a manner diametrically opposed to its avowed purpose, the mayhem it will cause to the people multiplies a thousand fold; it is even exponential.  The people suffer physically and spiritually. With wrong exercise of power, people get hungry and illiterate, and their freedoms curtailed.

By virtue of the command of politicians over the multitude of citizens, they can easily play god over the plight and fate of so many people. The trouble with this is that the more they exercise power, the more they think that they hold the destinies of people, and the more they delude themselves of being gods.

Politicians who go beyond the threshold of powerful leaders to being demigods do with delusions that they are already indestructible, that no opposition can stop their further ascent to power, and of perpetuating their grip over it. This is a psychological threshold that not only wreaks havoc over the nation but over the person himself.

We have witnessed in history men who have deluded themselves to be demigods that they led with seeming impunity. It is history too that proved that as long as these leaders are still made of flesh and bone, they too have to suffer the penalties of their abuse.

Adolf Hitler. Benito Mussolini. Saddam Hussein. Joseph Stalin.  These are international figures that have fallen from the ivory tower of their delusions to the ashes of their destructions.

In the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos is too recent in our memory.  He usurped presidential and legislative powers, and ruled with seeming impunity for more than two decades.  He too, like the rest of his breed, had to suffer the humility of defeat and destruction.

Despite the historical lessons, people do not seem to learn, and still insist on threading the path where others have fallen.  Is it human nature to learn things when they experience personally the agony of failure? Or is it just like a child that has to burn his finger to learn that something is really hot which much be avoided?

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is a well-read person.  She does not hold a graduate degree in economics without a good reading of history.

But despite the historical lessons, she is showing the symptoms of arrogance of power.  Maybe her stay in the palace when her father was then president, and her own nine years stay there has pushed her to a psychological threshold when a leader thinks that whatever she does, nothing can stop her nor could she be held accountable for it.

History has shown that when this psychological threshold is reached, the leader is prone to commit stupendous blunders.  These are blunders which the people could not anymore take, and therefore, they have no option but to punish the leader.

President Arroyo may have to meditate deep and long whether her charter change moves amount to a psychological threshold of arrogance of power.

Recalling Martial Law

Nightmares are not worth recalling.  That may be true if they occur in the privacy of our rooms, wrap in the eerie silence of the night.

But political nightmares deserved to be reminisced, debated upon, and reflected on, if we have to move forward as a nation.  A nation that has no common historical memory is just a hodge-podge of tribes without national identity.

On a personal level, I did not want to recall life under martial law.  The experiences were bad enough, and defying risks that went with the rallies were chilling to repeat.

But the innocent question of my ever precocious eight-year old boy changed the temper of yesterday’s 37^th martial law anniversary.

He asked:  “What is martial law? “  The lawyer in me wanted to parrot the constitutional basis of martial law, and the decisions rendered by the Supreme Court on the issue.  Of course, I would not have to discuss with my boy in a grandiose manner.  That would be Latin for him.

As I was about to tell my son what happened during the Marcos era, my fourteen-year old daughter proudly volunteered that according to the textbook, martial law was declared by then President Ferdinand Marcos on September 21, 1972.

That saved me from the cross-examination type questions of my boy.  He has the innocent knack of firing questions until you are left without answer.

But the incident led me to realize that while I, having experienced the horrors of martial law, could relate with increasing pulse rates and sweaty hands the dark years of Marcos dictatorship, the generation next to me, my daughter, has nothing but facts and statistics of the era, enough for her to win any quiz bee contest.

If only for my kids, I need to write this, to recall the events I personally experienced and the insights I learned under martial law in the hope that next time around, it is not only the facts but the full range of the tragic drama that was Marcos, must like the portrayal of the Greek dramas played out in the greater drama called life, that the succeeding generations could recount.

I was still seven years old and thirteen days when martial was declared.  There was no cable news, no newspapers in our barrio. There were only one or two transistor radios where the folks huddled to listen to the declaration of martial law.

Despite the innocence, I knew then there was some big news that day.  My father who kept a rifle hurriedly buried it somewhere.  Other folks did bury theirs too. Days after, soldiers inspected all the houses.  When they arrived in the house, I cowered in fear. I only glimpsed at the uniformed men, but I could hear the thuds of their boots, like the sound of the hooves of horsemen.

The beauty of pure innocence is that despite the horrors martial law wrought upon the people, I had carefree frolics with my friends in the pristine river, and the mountain treks in the then virginal forest, unmindful of the terror that gripped the people.

The burden with knowledge is the loss of innocence, and living in a gay abandon eludes forever.  Innocence is replaced with the angst for not acting on the dictates of what is right.

The high school years at the old Ateneo school just right there at the heartland of the city were spent reading books, and learning so many things from all fields.  The Jesuit-run school inspired critical thinking, the ability to see the issue in the broader perspective, as it were, in an eagle’s view.

Despite the adventures and misadventures of puberty though, the incarceration of the mayor of Cagayan de Oro Nene Pimentel in 1981 fired-up the protests of the already opposition-inclined people.  That too echoed in the corners of our classrooms.  Without political acumen or organization, we did have boycotts from our classes.  The reasons for our boycotts may have varied, but it reflected the over-all sentiment of the Cagayanons whose mayor was placed behind bars.

The horror of martial law was not anymore in somebody’s doorsteps but right there in the City Hall, the last citadel of democracy. It was an affront to the proud Cagayanons whose political pedigree came from the local heroes who fought many wars in the past.

Different folks have different ways of protesting. In the stage where the opposition was not yet so organized, the protesters were like sticks hoping to form a broom so they could have concerted and effective actions.  Meanwhile that the protest movement was still disorganized, opposition to martial law took different shapes, colors, and hues.  But the seed of revolution was unmistakably there already ready to explode in the most opportune time.

The martial law terror was unabated.  There was Elma, a relative who was shot on mere suspicion of being a sympathizer of the communists.

A good friend, the editor of the student publication of Ateneo de Davao was abducted, and no one knew what happened.  Just like other students  who were missing, she was another statistics of the martial law terror.

Killing fields were not only popular in North Vietnam.  We also shared the infamy.

The guns were blazing too in areas like Claveria, Salay, Lantad, Taglimao, and almost everywhere. In all these areas, human rights abuses were the norm rather than the exception.

Power is intoxicating. It can be delusional. After having wielded power without accountability, the powers-that-be are emboldened, and regard themselves as invincible, that they could commit abuses with impunity.

When the rulers do not see anymore the limits to their powers their doom begins.

Right before the glare of national and international opinion, Ninoy Aquino was martyred on August 21, 1983 as he deplaned from his exile in the US. That was stupid thing to do.  But drank with power, the rulers did not see it coming the start of their defeat with the mortal shot at Ninoy’s body. The mortal body died, but the immutable ideals came to life.

That was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

Suddenly, the disorganized protests had a common voice, a rallying point from which to launch their battle against the government, a battle plan drawn-out within the framework of the ideals of democracy.

I found myself co-founding a student political party at Xavier Universit.  The student party was founded on the precept that the students cannot live in the ivory tower of the academe but must lead the people in the struggle against the dictatorship.

There were rallies, civil disobedience, and other forms of protest.  And just like all other student leaders who dared challenged the dictatorship, the “red tag” was written in my forehead by the military, a tag that meant I could be “salvaged”, misnomer for assassination.

It was most unfortunate.  I knew of students who abhorred communism as much as they deplored Marcos dictatorship.  But in a war-like situation, the protagonists become color-blind.  Infiltration of the ranks of the students by the military and the reds were rampant.  Many were killed on mere suspicions.

I just laughed off the “red tag”, the communist label.  I have thoroughly studied Marxism in its primary sources and read the history of communism.  The flaws of the communist ideology are just glaring to ignore.  Embracing communism would be prostituting knowledge for expediency.

Expediency, I knew so many brilliant students who joined the communist’s movement for that reason. They joined the communist movement because it offered them concrete plans with which they could topple the dictator.  But I did not judge the folly or brilliance of their decisions. Instead of judging, there were tactical alliances of students from different colors in the political spectrum joining hands just to oust the dictator.

The students have the time, the mental prowess, and the fire in the belly to mount concerted actions against the dictator.  Organizing the students in Cagayan de Oro was the most logical thing to do and our group, composed of leaders from the left to the center, did manage to awaken the students.

The streets of Cagayan de Oro saw mass actions, protest marches, prayer rallies, and the famous “Welga Ng Bayan”. Xavier University students joined with students from Don Mariano, Cagayan de Oro College, Liceo de Cagayan and Lourdes College.

Activism was mainstream. The rising tide of dissent could not be doused anymore.

Ninoy was not the only martyr.  The casualties were many.  Several of the student leaders were gone, either they went underground, or they were invited by the military henchmen and never to return again.  Those were brilliant students whose whereabouts I have not heard of since.

For my daughter, my missing friends would just be mere statistics.  But after she reads this piece, hopefully, she may feel the pulse of life, and the tears of pain Martial Law has shed in the Philippine landscape.

The lawyers’ role

After decades of silence, I decided to write for public consumption.  Writing, of course, has been a daily dose for me.  There are just too many legal briefs to prepare, and deadlines to beat. Lawyers do these for a fee, except in rare pro bono cases.

But lawyers too are citizens, as Manny Valdehuesa, a fellow columnist, aptly said.  The practice of law is not a rehearsal of some sort that you can undo several times over.  Whenever and wherever justice has failed, there are some innocent souls who languish in the damp and cold concrete prison cells, and the guilty ones who, having the financial resource, go scot-free. When this happens, a social fabric is torn apart. Society weakens.

Lawyers are not gladiators in court, to be paid handsomely if they fought well in battle.  Law, to be a truly effective tool for social order and peace, requires competent and conscientious practitioners, people who advocate the higher ends of justice, sans the fee.

Definitely, we do not need the bearers of the law who are mum amid the spate of bribery in the justice system – in the law enforcement, in the prosecution, and yes, even in the bench.  These are lawyers  who  are  only up to fattening their pockets, a practice of law without a social conscience.

Look around.  Even the blind could see, and even the deaf could hear the cries of injustice.

There is Taglimao, a barangay which is near the city proper in terms of distance but would take an hour to reach due to bad roads, roads which are fit for off-road racing. Do the city officials know that Taglimao is part of their governance?  To make matter worse, the mostly unlettered residents are being harassed by barangay officials either by threat of bodily harm or legal suits.  That is plain terrorism.

Does anybody know that within our protected watershed areas, there is a plan to construct a cassava processing plant which threatens our potable water with cyanide which is a by-product of cassava? Who will stop this incessant threat to our environment?

For the incompetence of the prosecution to smell the fabrication of a case, one Geronimo Banac was indicted for rape, jailed for seven years in Lumbia city jail, and finally acquitted and released for lack of evidence.  Who will now compensate him for the loss of his dignity and sense of pride?

Take our lawmakers.  They extended the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law up to June 30, 2009, with a condition: lands would be covered under agrarian reform voluntarily.  They must be joking.  No landowners, not even the church, would voluntarily give up their lands.  Who will now fight for the cause of farmers who, in the language of then Raul Manglapus, “have been in the bondage of the lands they till”?

In a state of injustice, the bearers of the law must advocate, and fight ferociously as gladiators, in the court of justice, and in the court of public opinion as well.  But unlike gladiators of old times, the lawyers should bear witness to truth, law, and justice,  without expecting anything in return but the altruistic feeling that they too as citizens, have helped keep social order and communal peace.

There is a joke about lawyers.  In the genesis story, God created the earth, and gave order to the universe.  But before there was order, chaos presided.  Lawyers, who preside on chaos, therefore must have preceded creation.

This is an unfortunate joke, a virtual verdict of the law practice in the Philippines.  True indeed, there are misfits within the ranks.  Go to Manila, and you see  lawyers who put up a small mobile office to solicit notarial services.  There are those who are retained by drug-lords and gambling lords and do no lawyering duties except negotiating for the release of drug pushers or gambling dens operators, and inevitably bribe government officials. Others still are bragging in public about their close relations with a fiscal, or a judge , and could therefore fix a case.

This kind of lawyering takes away the majesty of the law, the true and noble function of the law as instrument developed through social evolution.  Out of the chaotic earthly life, it is the law that gives order, through peace pacts among warring tribes, treaties among the present day states, and the civil and criminal laws within a nation.  Take away the law, and true indeed, chaos will reign.

In a state of injustice, in the muddied waters of law and order, the law must spark; otherwise, we might go back to the evolutionary age when the fittest survive, and the weak, extinct. We would then be nothing but members of Darwin’s animal kingdom: less divine, more brutish.

In the new year 2009, let the law spark, within our hearts, specially in  the conscience of the bearers of the law.

Trade-offs of a Diaspora

The government, under past and present administrations, has been proud of its deployment of around eleven million Overseas Filipino Workers.  Almost all administrations trumpet this exodus of Filipinos abroad.  Without this deployment, the Philippine economy would have sunk in the pit long ago.

What help us tide over the financial global crises are the remittances of our overseas workers.

This Filipino Diaspora is more of an indictment of how Philippines had been badly governed.  Instead of being proud, any administration should bow its head in recognition of its failure at governance.  There is nothing to be proud about of having to send Filipinos abroad for greener pasture since there may be no pasture to speak about back home.

The foreign currency remittances have been the price tag of the trade-offs these modern day heroes have to endure.  In some countries such as Hong Kong, the word Filipina is synonymous with domestic helper. We have heard of tales of the cruelties our new heroes suffer under foreign employers.   Even foreign governments treated our fellowmen abroad harshly: just recall Flor Contemplacion, and Sarah Balabagan.

These sensational cases involving OFWs are not as destructive as the ill-effects the Diaspora have on the basic social unit of our society – the family.  Cases like those of Contemplacion and Balabagan received the most attention, and the parties involved usually are beneficiaries of the dole-outs of our image conscious politicians.

Suffering silently and without media hype is the Filipino family.

Parents leave small children to the care of relatives so they can work abroad, and earn decent living to support the children, and even the extended family. But parental care has no substitute.  Children of the OFWs suffer the psychological stigma of being left to their own, not to mention the pain they endure as they miss the embrace of their loving parents.

If you have eleven million OFWs, just multiply this with two children – the least a family has considering that the national average is three children per household – you readily have twenty two million children, without one or both parents in the household.  Twenty two million is already a big portion in our eighty million population overall.

The fate these children suffer under the set-up is only one facet of the story.

The marital woes must be taken into account when we speak of the trade-offs.

When both parents work abroad, the children suffer the most. When only one goes abroad, the marital problem multiplies a thousand fold.

The difficult part of working overseas is not the work or adjustment with the new culture.  Filipinos are known to be resilient and hardworking.  These are not issues to them.

Loneliness abroad is gnawing.  We are used to chit-chats, share jokes, and laugh with our neighbors even with the most mundane issue of the fighting spiders.  That we are by nature a cheerful and happy people despite the economic hardships should be conceded.

Being uprooted and thrown into lands where even the fellow-next-door is a stranger contributes largely to the loneliness of our OFWs.

Loneliness and being alone are strong emotions that prod one to seek for a company in a foreign land.  Under these circumstances, marital infidelity is almost unavoidable.

Try to take a census of your friends, relatives, and neighbors, the tales of broken marriages are most common.

I don’t have many friends whose spouses are working abroad.  The numbers do not exceed ten.  Of these few friends, there are four broken marriages.  Of the four friends, two received divorce papers almost at the same time.  One friend who followed his wife in the US was shock to learn the sorry news of his wife’s pregnancy.

Broken marriages and children without one or both parents in their growing-up years, these two are just the right elements for the destruction of the family.

The government should not take pride in sending Filipinos overseas. The trade-off in this Diaspora is the sacrifice of the family in the altar of foreign currencies. We may survive economically the present but we may have unwittingly bargained away the future generations of Filipinos.

Our nation without the strong family as the bedrock is doomed to fail in the long run.  The trade-offs may not be worth the sacrifice at all.

To top it all, we seem not to recognize the real trade-off.

Computer virus

A COMPUTER virus is a program that can copy itself and infect a computer without the permission or knowledge of the owner. Well, if this virus does not migrate from the computer to some other place, there should be not much of a problem. A computer expert can undo the damage.

Where the computer virus plays out in real life, there the real problem emerges which can infect our culture, further damaging whatever is left. The damage, like cancer, cannot be undone.

Technology is here to stay. The modes with which we communicate with others are defined largely by text messages, chats, and emails. Continents are bridged, thanks to the Internet.

We are now a global village.

The territorial barriers are breached easily with emails. Violence and suppression in Burma and Iran were instantly flashed in cable news, exposing into the light the dark and sinister acts of these regimes.

We will not miss mentioning the inter-racial marriages, courtesy of amorous chats. The financial transactions sweep across continents in an instant through the data transmitted via submarine cables.

These are the plusses of the Internet. But we cannot gloss-over the downsides.

While in a party, a lady excused herself. One wonders if there was an emergency that she had to go in haste. Actually, she went online to harvest, as she explained later when she re-appeared, the grapes, which she planted in Farmville, a virtual game that is very popular in a social network format in the Internet — Facebook.

It turned out that the lady spends no less than four hours a day to stay competitive in this virtual game.

Except for the man-hours lost, we need not worry the mental and psychological health of this lady. She is mature enough.

What should worry us are the young ones.

These children spend hours in the Internet, not to research for loads of information, but to play computer games. Instead of reading, time is spent battling against virtual empires and soldiers. The children suffer a double whammy – they imbibe the culture of violence and at the same time lose the habit of reading.

What is most alarming for the young in this age of Internet is misconstruing the virtual for reality, and vice-versa. The demarcation line between reality and virtual is blurred.

Imagine a kid rushing to be online so that he can feed the virtual dog, which would accordingly die if he does not feed it with virtual food on time. Over time, the kid makes the virtual pet a part of his real life. The kid straddles between the virtual and the real, and in the process loss the concept of what separates the two worlds.

The pathetic part about this whole thing is that the kid’s excellence in the virtual world is in a way directly proportional to his skill in isolating himself from the real world as he immerses into the virtual kind. To some extent, one’s excellence in the computer game is gauged with his capacity to focus with ferocity on his game, on his ability to detach himself from his surrounding, from the real world.

If this computer virus plays out uncheck in the real world, we might yet see a whole new generation of human beings who are anti-social, people who find comfort in taking care of virtual beings instead of the real ones.

Slowly this virus is creeping into the fabric of our society. It must be recognized now. Unlike our computers which we can fix with easily, this is not so in our daily living. The virus is imperceptible but its damage is apparent and insidious.

Honoring Tita Cory

Appropriating the prefix “Tita” before Cory does not necessarily connote blood relation. Cory is virtually “Tita” to all Filipinos.  She is part of our respective families.  So when she died last August 1, 2009, a part of us died too.

Cory’s death though does not end her legacy.  Her legacy continues in the hearts of men.  Her body will turn to dust, as we all as heirs of the Original Sin will succumb, but her spirit lives on in us.

She was an icon of democracy and the embodiment of what a true leader should be.

Before Ninoy Aquino died on August 21, 1983, Cory played the perfect role of a wife, and mother. In the glaring lights of national stage, she was just there in the house while her husband took center stage.

The fractious opposition had no leader who could unify the entire nation against the draconian Marcos-led dictatorship.  She would have opted to stay at the back stage but the nation called for her selfless service.

When the survival of the nation depended on her, she did not balk.  Instead of cooking chicken liver pate which was her favorite dish, she was right there in the glare of the limelight, challenging a powerful dictator.

Ferdinand Marcos, with his academic credentials, the military, and all the vast resources of the government at his disposal, arrogantly exclaimed: “A mere housewife will challenge me?”

A housewife indeed challenged a dictator.  But without Marcos knowing it, he was up against a housewife who may not have the physical strength to match his but who had fortitude in spirit that was unbreakable, a spirit that suffered in silence when Ninoy was jailed, and finally, killed. She was at the receiving end of martial law. Pain and suffering, these two make the spirit stronger. If Cory were steel, hers was life borne out of the furnace.

Once she decided to fight, there was no retreat.  She campaigned like hell throughout the countryside. She led the protest actions, prayer rallies, and civil disobedience. She unsheathed the steel of courage when she was cheated in the polls.  She braved with grace the seven coup attempts the once spoiled military staged during her term.

When she took her oath as president at the Club Filipino, her physique was visibly thin.  But the hope and euphoria that swept across the archipelago loomed large above all. In a land desolate for two decades of martial law, Cory and the ideals she represented was the guiding torch of the Filipinos and the world.

At no other moment in history was the Filipino prouder than the magic Cory weaved. For once, we held our heads high and proud to be truly Filipinos.  Cory received spontaneous standing ovations when she spoke before the US Congress. More than that, Cory led a revolution which was emulated in the breaking down of the Berlin wall that divided Germany, and thereafter, in freeing the rest of Eastern Europe in bloodless revolutions.  We bowed our heads when we saw her in the cover of TIME Magazine as the woman of the year.

The celebration of Cory’s life unconsciously, is the celebration of the life of the nation as well.  Subjugated by Spain for 300 years, by Americans for 45 years, and briefly but no less violently by Japan, the Filipinos’ heads were bowed. Cory too, a housewife, suffered under the shadows of paternalistic society that bequeathed to the woman, the household chores.

Cory’s triumph in life is a victory of the dream that the nation has been aspiring: That yes, the Filipino is worth dying for! EDSA I was not only liberation of the nation from dictatorship.  It was also a rebirth of the aspirations of a race that once landscaped our archipelago before the conquistadores arrived in our shores.

She set out to re-establish the democratic institutions that were systematically mangled by then Pres. Marcos. The press breathed the new air of freedom. The Congress ceased to be a rubber stamp.  The Supreme Court regained its lost prestige when Imelda Marcos once made its chief justice her umbrella boy.

Instead of being intoxicated in power, Cory, in her last SONA bid farewell to the people.  She stepped down in office without overtures of clinging to it.

Yet, she knows that the life of the nation did not end in EDSA I; in fact, it was its rebirth.  As the nation marches on, it will be buffeted by winds of corruption, treason and treachery, and the affliction of the weak in spirit – arrogance of power.

Before she died, and even when she was diagnosed with cancer, she urged us to fight these winds.  She was like a Don Quixote.  Now that she is dead, we can only show our gratitude to her by continuing her ideals, which are our nation’s too.

lost cause

THE cost of the guerrilla war the communists have been waging for four decades now is huge in terms of money, lives, and opportunities for development and peace.

How many billions have been spent on either side of the tracks to buy munitions and allied operating costs that go with a war? How many lives of young men and women have been sacrificed in the altar of ideology?

 

The money could have been spent to alleviate the plight of the poor. Bright young minds could have been channeled to nation-building instead of destruction.

Way back in college, when the blood was searing hot with ideals, I cannot count anymore how many mass actions I participated in – Welga Ng Bayan, picket lines, civil disobedience. That age was the time when dying for worthy causes seemed a better option than just being a bystander watching history unfolding.

Yet, for all the ideals, there was not an instance when I entertained the idea of embracing communism. Many student leaders who I knew then were already in the front organizations of the National Democratic Front goaded me to hop into the wagon of rebellion. Ironically though, most of the ideologues did not understand fully well the Marxist thought. What they had were slogans and sound bites.

The sounds never bit me though. Two years of reading the primary works of Karl Marx, Hegel, and even that of Lenin’s and Mao’s led me to conclude that yes, communism needed a leap of faith to hope for a classless society, a utopia, a promise of a Neverland much like religion which Karl Marx described as the opium of the people.

Equality among men can never be attained. What we can hope for is equal opportunities and equal treatment before the law. The latter is already enshrined in the equal protection clause in the bill of rights of our 1987 constitution.

But to hope for a classless society is more faith in content, much akin to the promise of afterlife. Always, there are always men of sterling character who will lead the masses, men gifted with charisma and leadership skills.

They may be men like Abraham Lincoln, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, and to be current, Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin who still calls the shots in the Russian politburo. You can find these men in the different echelons of society, men who are living witnesses that God did not actually create men as equals. This is a reality which we cannot deny.

Despite the hallow promises of communism, many of my brilliant friends indeed hopped into the wagon, and never to be heard again. There was this editor of Ateneo de Davao, a law student in Xavier University, and before I forgot, my literary editor who surreptitiously inserted in our publication the manifesto of the Kabataan Makabayan.

The burden of brilliance is that you cannot help but dream, and forge a vision of society. To the inquisitive mind, the status quo is always wanting. The tendency is to be non-conformists. During the Marcos regime, the universities were fertile grounds of idealistic and brilliant students who did not need convincing to join the underground movement.

History has unmasked the illusions communism promised. The 90’s saw the collapsed of the iron curtain, and with it the fall of East Berlin, Romania, and other communist regimes. Russia, under Michael Gorbachev, had to invent glasnost and perestroika; China, starting from Deng Xiaoping, opened her doors to the capitalist system.

Otherwise, these once two pillars of communism could not have survived the economic challenges the new millennium poses. [Content-wise, Russia and China are not anymore communist states but socialists with authoritarian rule.]

Yet, the Communist Party of the Philippines still continues to wage the guerrilla war. The tolls are beyond measure. The masses are still burdened with revolutionary taxes. The guns are still firing in the countryside. Even within the rebel movement, purges every now and then saw the excavations of mass graves, of skeletons piled atop the other in the name of an ideology.

And you cannot help but ask, for what cause and towards what end? Why fight to install a communist’s regime that has unmasked its falsity?

History has relegated the pretenses and illusions of communism in the dustbin. What are left now are the detritus of the ideological conflicts of the past century. History as it has unfolded simply cannot make communism a viable alternative. In fact, whenever the adjective “communist” prefixes an ideologue, one wonders what the adjective really means.

Communism is better put for good in the closet, a red-shirt once worn – a social experiment that never proved its hypotheses correct. Why wear the clothing when it has been shown that it does not fit the occasion? Why insist on an ideology that in the vast experiment called life, nothing has been proven right?

It is time for the Communist Party of the Philippines to re-invent itself. Insisting on pursuing a violent struggle is a blind pursuit of political power without a really strong ideological mooring. It is a walk in the dark without knowing where it should end.

Or, shall we ask, what for comrade?

 

vigilantism and death squads

What should distinguish the homo sapiens from the rest of the animal kingdom is the respect for law and order. Although throughout human history, we have seen the erratic regard for the law, we still stick to the ideal that the nobler side of man is his capacity to comply with the norms and mores that society imposes upon him.

Society has evolved from the cave, to the tribe, to kingdom, to nation-state, to international groupings, and thanks to technology, to the global village. But although technology has developed in exponential proportions, the same cannot be said of our respect for law and order.

The bestial side of man manifests in terrorist acts, economic sabotage, neo-colonialism, and when all hell break loose, man’s ugliest side is seen in wars.

But nothing compares to the death squads that kill criminals summarily in the name of protecting the peace and quite of society. These groups engage in hypocritical discourse that they are needed in a society where the justice system fails. They take the law into their hands, and would want us to call them our defenders.

The death squads and whoever led them are playing gods, hypocrites and arrogant breeds who claim to weed out the scums of the earth. But when they operate beyond the law, who will now take them to account the many they killed who turned-out to be innocent? Or to render justice to victims who were killed simply due to personal spite?

Since 1998, more than 800 victims in Davao City died at the hands of vigilantes who usually ride in a motorcycle in a group of two using the high-powered .45 caliber pistol, then in the presence of witnesses, pump bullets into the victims. The perpetrators walk away from the crime scene as if nothing happened. And the police, true to the joke that they maintain the peace, come minutes after, when there is no more threat but the terrified but muted silence of the on-lookers.

Mayor Rodrigo Duterte, with bravado, exclaimed that you should be afraid to live in Davao City if you are a criminal or a member of a syndicate. He points out to the relative peace in the City. But the Human Rights Watch, an international body, points out that according to statistics provided by the Philippines National Police, the number of annual crime incidents has increased some 219 percent in the last decade, while the city’s population rose only by 29 percent. An increasing number of death squad killings appear to have made crime rates worse in Davao.

In Cebu City, there have been reported killings perpetrated by the vigilantes. The vigilante-style killing has claimed 167 lives already since December 2004. Msgr. Achilles Dakay claimed that the vigilantes appeared well-trained, organized and well-paid. Yet despite the vigilante-style killing, crime rate in Cebu City has not abated.

In Cagayan de Oro City, vigilante-style killings have been reported. Usually, the victims are members of the notorious gang of hoodlums known as Batang Mindanao or simply B.M. These victims have been going in and out the jail and have their bodies tattooed with the initials B.M. Still, the killing is done by motorcycle riding men who use .45 caliber pistol in shooting the suspect.

Equally alarming to the spate of death squad killings is that no vigilante group has even been arrested and hailed to court to account for violating the penal laws of the land. The number of vigilante killing in Davao is now 800 or so, but no one has ever been caught. Mayor Duterte cannot take pride that the criminals live dangerously in that city. Even with the vigilantes, the crime rate there has grown exponentially.

Besides, as a lawyer and as a mayor, he should know that vigilantes violate the laws, and should therefore be arrested, prosecuted, and put to jail. Fact is no vigilante has been arrested. The Davao Death Squad has been associated with him, and if only to erase this stigma, he should rein on the vigilantes. Otherwise, he will forever bear the stigma.

The same is true with Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmena. 167 vigilante-style killing since December 2004 is no joke. It will be good to the honor of the surname he carries if vigilantes will be caught.

Across the country, there has been a marked increase of reported vigilante killings that this practice of exacting justice, if it does at all, is becoming a counter-culture, that threatens to further undermine our justice system.

Every victim who dies in the hands of the vigilantes is one strand that is taken away from the fabric of our society. If this goes unabated, one day, we will realize that there is no more strand that binds us all. When that day comes, God forbid, the law of the jungle will reign instead of the rule of law. People will now take the law in their hands.

That day, we shall have retrogressed in the evolutionary ladder from human to beast, instead of the Darwinian model.