Today, the relentless struggles by the current activists and revolutionaries manifest a continuing cultivation of this counter-consciousness. It is a matter of conviction and commitment of these new and arising forces to let this counter-consciousness bloom to fullness and fruition. The cultural activist blooms wherever he/she is planted!
By DON J. PAGUSARA
Davao Today
The national consciousness that dominates in Philippine society is an offspring of history and tradition. Anything that resides in the mind of a Filipino is an integral element of the totality of a collective consciousness. And this collective consciousness is a kind of worldview embedded in the culture and tradition of the people to which everyone is heir to.
It is a river or a mainstream in which every member of society bathes and swims to one’s comforts or discomforts. There are fortunate ones who delight in the blessings and privileges afforded by the mainstream waters. Perhaps, they happen to have stayed in the bountiful lushness in their areas of the riverbanks. And they enjoy life brimming with contentment!
Many may be undergoing varying degrees of discomforts and troubles in their parts of the river system. Maybe they happen to be in muddy river shores, or maybe the mainstream waters always beset them with fast flowing turbulence. And life is anything but comfortable.
But everyone accepts, adopts and adapts to this collective consciousness as gift of a divine provider or as an unassailable mandate of earthly life’s existential happenstance. Certainly, poverty is a reality not to be questioned. It is an edict of Fate that the hapless many have to put up with having been situated in the swampy parts.
And this is a truism that governs the thoughts and actions of most everyone in society.
It constitutes a kind of social equilibrium that no one is supposed to disturb lest it destabilizes what has always been held sacred or inviolable. Or lest it compromises social and community life itself.
Those who are blest to benefit with the prevailing thought-system would naturally arrogate unto themselves the “noble” task of safeguarding it. They mobilize and harness all conceivable resources — material, spiritual and otherwise — for its perpetual dominance. Theirs is the enviable function of guardians or defenders of the Status Quo.
Such function was the very mandate of the governor-generals, friars and guardia civils during the Spanish colonial era. The same responsibility rested on the shoulders of the American colonial officials during their rule in the islands.
But in any river system, there is always an undercurrent. This was also the truism that gave sustenance to the counter-consciousness that governed the ethos and actions of the Filipino Katipuneros and Revolucionarios who challenged the dominant consciousness of the detested colonial times.
Then came American colonial rule. Its establishment ushered in a new brand of consciousness which has hitherto constituted the national consciousness that prevails among the Filipino people in our society.
This national consciousness has been systematically rammed into the Filipino soul through the educational system and through the legal and socio-cultural institutions that make Little Brown Americans of the Filipinos across the archipelago, most particularly the urban populations.
So pervasive has been the consequences of the American cultural assaults, the most virulent among which is the imposition of the English language as medium of instruction in the public school system. Added to this, the avalanche of American pop culture through the mass media and cultural institutions, like the vaudeville, ascertained the assimilation of the American ways of life by the Filipino citizenry.
Every Filipino desires to become American-like — if it is highly impossible to be ka-look-alike, at least ka-talk-alike!
But, the decades of the 1960s and ‘70s witnessed an upsurge of a counter-consciousness that challenged the sacrosanct truths and canons of the Filipino collective consciousness. This was aptly called the Second Propaganda Movement and caused the mobilization of great multitudes of the Filipino youth and students in a Cultural Revolution that aimed at demolishing the citadel of reactionary national consciousness.
Today, the relentless struggles by the current activists and revolutionaries manifest a continuing cultivation of this counter-consciousness. It is a matter of conviction and commitment of these new and arising forces to let this counter-consciousness bloom to fullness and fruition. The cultural activist blooms wherever he/she is planted!
As an undercurrent water flow that counters the mainstream consciousness in our society, the thriving counter-consciousness shall become the cultural force that will sweep away the reactionary feudal and colonial culture that prop up the miserable conditions of poverty and hopelessness among our people today.
Then shall the counter-consciousness turn into a national consciousness.
Don J. Pagusara is a native of Mindanao, a multi-awarded author and a Palanca-awardee.
