More and more sectors, groups and individuals—and oh, a considerable number of the lawmakers in Congress!—have expressed their calls to President Duterte to resume the scuttled Peace Talks. They lament the squandered chance of this nation’s lifetime!
Forgetting the past is an unforgiveable pitfall ever to befall a nation or a race. It provides certainty to a repetition of past errors or wrongs—a repetition that allows for even more serious and far-reaching consequences.
Certainly each of these people’s revolts in separate islands and at different times has its particularity in terms of motivation and specific cause or reason.
There’s no better way to excavate the long-buried cry of the Earth’s brown child than on this day of his reflection—or celebration? —of his mortality. He is aware of this as often as he settles himself in bed at night to sleep, but comfortable in unperturbed confidence that he has even in his most slumbering forgetfulness a likeness who does not perish, his immortal other-self, what he calls his soul.
The country is now blest to have a President Duterte who has taken a principled anti-imperialist stance as opposed to that of all past presidents.
For so long the Philippine government has never adopted full freedom and independence. It has always been tied up to the United States of America ever since its birth as a republic in 1946 whence the late Manuel A.Roxas was the first puppet president.
Well, we have certainly left on the parchment of history prints and traces of our participation in some crucial moments of the unfinished revolution.
Anthropology professor of UP-Mindanao Aya Ragragio invited us for a visit to the Libingan ng mga Bayani. She showed us an aerial view of the place and then took us for a leisurely promenade around it while spiritedly confiding everything she knew about the consecrated ground
President Rodrigo Duterte even extended aid to these evacuees at Haran, giving food and other necessities when he was still Mayor of the City. Would the good Mayor have come to their aid if he did not approve and commend the humanitarian deeds of the concerned groups?
By countless generations of the deprived masses—
The dream of Peace, Social Justice, Equality.
