Digging up on old issues of Gimbao (newsletter publication of the defunct DEMS or Development Education Media Services Inc.) I came upon this article by Davao scholar and historian Macario D. Tiu, written 19 years ago. The essay entitled “Culture of Defeat”. strikes me as still throbbing with bloody reality and still very relevant to the present-day crisis in Philippine society. And so I decided to have it reprinted in full here -
I will not tell you about the ordeal we suffered, but I will tell you about how that did not stop me.
Ironically, I must leave what I know as home for what I know as a battlefield: from Mindanao to Manila. Strange, how years before, my paradigm was in a complete reverse, patterned to common myths of vain consequence. And now, my permanent home will not be the mapped streets and affixed buildings of the known city that I head toward, but the roving mountains and seas, unmarked except by restless feet that follow stars and struggles. Soon enough, I shall be called back home.
At this point in our nation’s journey through time as a republic, we are thankful to President Benigno S. Aquino III for having forewarned us about the possibility of an abnormal type of governance to happen in our country. We are thankful because we are promptly reminded by his own pronouncements to be extra alert and be closely on guard lest we be caught flat-footed like what happened in 1972 when then President Ferdie Marcos declared martial rule over the entire Philippine archipelago.
The simple logic is: Since the rich mineral resource lands are ancestral domains of the Lumads, it goes without saying that the Lumads should be removed! By deceit or by death.