AST year we had
the landslide that wiped out Ginsaugon from St. Bernard in Leyte, and the
Guimaras oil spill disaster, and Milenyo, followed by yet another, Reming.
Hundreds of lives were lost. Billions in property were destroyed and thousands
face an uncertain future.
We had 1017 proclaimed right after some military officers
"confessed" to their chief of staff that they could not hold their boys from
joining a rally against the commander-in-chief. Mercifully, we had the Supreme
Court.
Then some of self-proclaimed constitutional experts were used
to foist a fake people’s initiative upon the nation. Again mercifully, we had
the Supreme Court. The congressmen rammed through a proposal to convene a
constituent assembly out of themselves, solamente and to the exclusion of the
other house of Congress. Their ringleaders performed legal acrobatics and verbal
assaults that only the gutter could take. Mercifully, they were doing this on
live television, even in the wee hours of the morning, and the public was
shocked. Mercifully, too, the institutional Church was shocked. Well, almost.
Enough at least to stop politics from going beyond the art of the possible into
the art of pre-conditioned lunacy.
We had several Killings of rather prominent persons, and
daily killings of ordinary folks. This unabated violence projected us into the
consciousness of the whole world as a nation where the law is helpless against
crimes of impunity, where human life is so cheap, and its value so
unappreciated.
And just before Christmas hushed us into the season of grace.
Garci was exonerated for perjury and falsification of his passport by Raul’s
henchmen at Padre Faura. Poor Ormoc responded to the Garci gentrification by a
fire so swift that it killed 25 innocent lives on Christmas Day, mismo! And on
the last hour of the last working day of 2006, Lance Corporal Daniel Smith was
sprung from his Makati prison and brought "home" to "American soil" through a
mission impossible sanctioned by the presidential legal counsel’s "brilliant"
twisting of the law.
So what else is new? Isn’t every year in the benighted land,
annus horribilis?
***
But wait! Stargazers and feng shui experts, astrologers and
tarot card readers are almost unanimous in saying that next year, rather, the
year that has just started, is annus horribilis once more, double or maybe
treble the magnitude of horror.
There will be earthquakes and floods, great fires and famine.
Hunger will stalk the land, they warn. So whatever else could be new? The people
have begun to accept their fate with resignation. What a country.
***
On Dec. 30, 2006, a national holiday as far as I could
remember, reserved to commemorate the martyrdom of the national hero, Gat Jose
Protacio Rizal, the president was again in Baguio City, her favorite Christmas
retreat. The vice-president was unavailable too. So was the Senate president.
And the speaker of the House. And everyone and his mother too.
Down the line they searched for someone to raise the flag and
do the national hero the symbolic reverence that was due him. Good that Mayor
Lito Atienza of the City of Manila was in town. By his lonesome self, he saluted
the national hero in front of the monument beneath which the mortal remains of
Dr. Rizal were interred.
Has Rizal become merely the hero of Manila, no longer the
nation’s? Why, even the head of the National Historical Institute, Ludovico
Badoy, was absent.
Thanks to Mayor Tukayo, someone remembered Jose Rizal. And to
think the hero of Manila, its native son, is Andres Bonifacio. Fittingly,
Manila’s officialdom honors Bonifacio each year on Nov. 30, at the Liwasan which
carries his name and has evolved into the center of plebeian ferment. Sadly
though, the rest of the nation is busy buying paputok, and its leaders are
elsewhere – in Baguio, in New York, in China, anywhere else but Rizal Park.
Marcos "stole" the Luneta from the City of Manila, as well as
its environs, by several martial-law decrees. And yet, only Manila for years
now, reveres the hero martyred at the Luneta. The national leadership was more
concerned with the fate of an American "rapist".
***
Perhaps this is why we suffer the fate we continue to
languish in as a people and as a nation. The rest of our Oriental neighbors
revere their past and worship the memory of their ancestors. We have erased
traces of our noble past, take no pride and place little value in the sacrifices
of our heroes, possess not on iota of that exhilarating, edifying, ennobling
virtue called sense of nationhood.
Well, for whatever it’s worth folks, let’s keep praying the New Year comes as
blessing, as water upon parched land.
