By now we have all had a good laugh over the considered pronouncement of Bongbong Marcos that, had it not been for 1986, his father would have transformed the nation into a Singapore.
No doubt the very same loyalists who propelled him to the Senate take his pronouncements seriously. It seems that the country that had had too much of the Marcoses now cannot get enough of them: La Imelda is a congresswoman from the north, and daughter Imee is governor of Ilocos Norte. Will Senator Bongbong make a run for the presidency in 2016? Is the pope Catholic? We seem to be a nation of masochists or irremediably plagued by attention deficit disorder, or both. Consider, too, the case of Erap, ousted by EDSA Dos and subsequently convicted of corruption, though later pardoned by then President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. You would have thought such public disgrace was the end of his political career. Nope: Erap might have won the last presidential elections had the field of candidates been much smaller.
Could we be a populace enamored of beginnings, infatuated with the ever-resonant promise of a fresh start that somehow demands we not focus on what tripped us up but rather on what we can do?
In 1986 and 2000, we opened the doors to let out stale air and allow fresh winds to blow through. What we didn’t do was to throw out the clunky furniture and the trapos. And so our house remains cluttered, creaky, and decrepit as ever.
People Power was a magical moment precisely because people remembered what had been done, and continued to be done, to their sense of dignity, their freedoms, and their notion of self-worth: stripped, humiliated, and mocked at. There was a collective sense of urgency. Carpe diem! And so we did. The power was in the people, as it has always been, and there it resides now, but dormant. Bernardo Carpio lives, not in some mystical and mythical mountain fastness or cave, but deep in ourselves. Carpe Carpio! We are all Bernardo Carpio(s) as we are all his jailers as well. P-Noy put it (very well, I thought) in his inaugural speech: Kayo ang boss ko. I just hope he has the courage and the know-how to keep his resolve (which I assume is sincere) of creating a government that does look upon the taxpayers as its boss. The other side of the equation is that the people stick to their role of letting the government know loudly and clearly what is in their best interests, and to take action when governance, whether at the local or national level, fails to be truly representative.
Translated into the world of the everyday, how does one keep alive that collective sense of urgency, of being vigilant against the well-funded cabal of corrupt politicians, military officers, thieves in the bureaucracy, murderous warlords, and other insidious insects that have plagued us for too long? A more fundamental question is: how much do we really wish to transform our society? How much pain are we willing to endure to achieve fundamental changes? These too are the questions now being asked in Tunisia and Egypt.
Mass civil action, as evidenced in Gandhi’s India, say, or in1986 and in 2011 (to cite just a few examples), where commonality supersedes class, works. Taking to the streets is a highly effective tool, though, if done mindlessly, can lead to mob rule. Thinking without action, on the other hand, is equally fruitless and counterproductive. In this age of social networking and of the Internet, it is seductively easy to believe that the virtual world can supersede the hard realities of the three-dimensional lives we lead. Whether through TV, radio, the cell phone, the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, or plain rumor, in 1986 and today, citizens first communicated, read each other’s messages, witnessed the palpable and seemingly sudden emergence of a common cause, and then as one peaceably demanded their rights.
Action with thought, thought with action. I remember one man, among several I can think of, who seamlessly fused both: Lino Brocka, the film director who from the 1970s through the beginning of the 1990s, directed gritty neo-realist dramas, always with a flair for melodrama that broadened their appeal at the same time that they portrayed the social and political realities that undermined both the glossy falsifications of Philippine society that the Marcoses favored and the naive optimism brought on by People Power. From Maynila sa Kuko ng Liwanag to Jaguar, from Bayan Ko to Ora Pro Nobis, Brocka was an unflinching social gadfly. (The last two screenplays, by the way, were written by the poet and journalist, Pete Lacaba, himself a political prisoner during Martial Law.) Imelda detested Brocka’s films, as they didn’t exactly encourage viewers to want to lead the lives of Filipinos. Brocka was also, for a while, a director for the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA), and he organized Concerned Artists of the Philippines (CAP), to challenge the censorship policies of the Marcos regime and, later, of the Aquino government. When needed he was in the forefront of street protests, and addressed the crowds in passionate, often salty, language that gave him street cred. One time, he joined a protest of jeepney drivers and was briefly jailed, alongside theater director and activist Behn Cervantes.
To her credit, Aquino appointed him to serve as one of those charged with coming up with a constitution to replace the 1973 one that Marcos had engineered. Brocka quit before the final draft was adopted, convinced that the vested interests were still dominant, even though certain progressive notions were now in the new Constitution. He has since been proven right.
Clearly, Brocka was exceptional, worthy of both our admiration and our emulation. He would have been the last person, however, to pontificate on how to be engaged in working for a better tomorrow. In his case, cinema and artistic expression constituted the battlefield because that was where his passion lay. If he needed to be out there marching, then he did, for that too was where his dreams resided. He may or may not have known it, but he took to heart the epigram William Butler Yeats used for his 1914 volume of poems, “In dreams begins responsibility.”
What is your dream for the Philippines? And what responsibility will you take on?
(Reprinted with permission from the author. First posted in INQUIRER.net on March 8, 2011)