Lessons of ‘86

TWENTY-eight years ago, a handful of personalities decided that enough was enough. Armed with courage and conviction, they faced off with hopelessness and certain defeat and probable destruction. But when they sounded the clarion call, multitude of people responded—surrounding the two main military camps of the country to stymie the rampaging tanks and soldiers from either capturing them or destroying them. With a bit of luck, the dictator stayed his hand—and even in the face of his advisers urging him to bomb the two camps to kingdom come, he uncharacteristically stood his ground. Soon enough, the uprising spread and in a matter of days, a 20-year reign came to a crashing end.

And so we now have the present. We can now say what we want to say without fear of being picked up in the dead of the night by military operatives and thrown into solitary confinement. But it is quite regretful that so many of us today do not seem to understand that the very freedom they now enjoy is owed to that fateful event of 1986. Not only have most of us forgotten the past, we seemed to have also lost along the way the lesson it taught.

The people whom our elders chased out of the country in February 28 years ago, have succeeded in repackaging themselves. And with the help of a quite short memory of our people have triumphantly transformed their personas from that of the oppressor to the seemingly oppressed. Why some of them are also painting themselves as either guardians of freedom or fighters of our basic rights. But make no bones about it: leopards do not change their spots; neither do tigers change their stripes.

They would always be what they are. And their only regret—or so it would seem—was that their “happy days” were cut short by that February event. A regret they are hell bent on correcting which is why they are now positioning themselves to regain the power they have lost by advocating that the 20-year reign of terror was actually the best years of the Philippines. And this could work now as most of the democracy icons responsible for the ouster of the dictator have either left us for a better world or have allied themselves to this clique. To top it all, the generation of today are quite unaware of the sacrifices of 1986 and absolutely have no idea what Martial Law, curfew, military dragnets, illegal detentions, crony capitalism and conjugal dictatorship are all about. No thanks to the flood of YouTube videos that extol the virtues of “Bagong Lipunan” and Martial Law and Facebook posts that glorify the very people chased out of this country 28 years ago. All these gull the naïve youth about believing that that those 20 years—14 were Martial Law years—were the best time in the country’s history. Naiveté, gullibility and ignorance should not become the cause for us to lose our freedom and the democracy our forebears fought for.

Santayana once said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We, Filipinos, may have a short term memory and we may oft laugh at our own follies and mistakes but this lesson is no laughing matter neither is it a stuff to be made a butt of jokes. The event of 1986 is what defines us as a country now and it would be of extreme bêtise if we either do not heed it or completely forget it.