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.
This is our time. The fate of the Philippines is in our hands. Let’s do this for our country. Let us redeem its dignity where it lost it—right where we are now. Let us be who we are called to be. Let us not allow anyone to enslave us further. Let’s do this not for hatred of the government, but for the love of our country, our motherland.
Last Sunday, while groups under the banner of the National Democratic Movement were having a picket-rally at Davao City’s Freedom Park, another group was holding its own collective action at another public place in the City. And while the national democrats were lambasting the absurdity of the so-called Philippine-American Friendship, the other group which was led by a certain Ely Pamatong was unabashedly pro-American.
This day—July 10—is my birth day anniversary. It was impossible for the remarkable events that happened to my life on this day in 1974 and onward to all the years during my detention to escape from my remembrances.
The existence of any entity in this world is inherently invested with a purpose or function—what we call its reason for being. It’s true to natural things as to human creations. That which ensues from the inventive genius or creative passion of humans belongs to that domain we call Art and properly falls under the concerns of the Humanities. But that is not the subject of this essay.
Nora Aunor, superstar, multi-awarded actress, source of quotable one-liners, received a “people’s award” last Friday from the groups Gabriela and Peace for Life.
