http://www.inq7.net/opi/2001/aug/21/opi_csdequiros-1.htm

Phil. Daily Inquirer

Blasts from the past

A COUPLE of weeks ago, they were still at it. South Korea was still vehemently protesting the release of Japan’s official history textbooks, for use in schools, that depicted Japan’s militarist venture half a century ago in largely benign terms. The textbooks made no mention of the rape of Nanking and the mind-boggling atrocities the Japanese troops wreaked in Korea and the Philippines. Certainly, they made no mention of the sex slaves, also called comfort women, that the Japanese troops made of many Korean and Filipino women.

Both the Korean elderly and youth took part in rallies in various parts of South Korea, condemning the Japanese interpretation of its occupation of the Asian countries during World War II. The Japanese prime minister was a particular hate object for promising during the elections to visit the so-called heroes’ graveyard in Japan, which the South Koreans, as well indeed as many Japanese, considered paying tribute to emperor-worship and Japan’s militarist past.

All of it made me marvel at how some people could look at the past with such passion, treating it not as something one routinely pays homage to, but as something that throbs in the air as vitally as today’s news. It made me stand in awe at how some people could look at the past not as a record of events that you file in the hard disc in the mind, but as a living event that matters like life and death itself. I particularly found it impressive that the generation in South Korea who had gone through the ordeal of the Japanese occupation had managed to transmit their experiences to the young and made them share their outrage and agitation over Japan’s attempt at a historical whitewash.

Today is an especially good time to ponder that thought. Aug. 21 is a most unusual date in Philippine history in that it marks two very important events, both of which became turning points. But you wonder, given that Aug. 21 has come and gone in the past few years without fanfare or comment, if people still remember them. In the past, Aug. 21 even spawned a whole organization, the August Twenty One Movement (Atom). I don’t know if most Filipinos still recall it, or have even heard of it.

The first event took place exactly 30 years ago today. That was the Plaza Miranda bombing. I still remember vividly how it was on Aug. 21, 1971. By early evening that night, the country was gripped in terror. Where I lived, which was a rough neighborhood in Sta. Mesa, home to rock bands and drug pushers, all the transistor radios were blaring out the news while I walked home: The Liberal Party political rally in Plaza Miranda had just been bombed. Several were dead and scores were hurt. It wasn’t known how many of the LP candidates were among the dead and wounded. Jovito Salonga, the leading LP senatorial candidate, had taken the brunt of the blast (it wasn’t known yet what had caused it). He was either dead or dying.

Don McLean’s "American Pie" was the hit song then, and I suddenly remembered his refrain about "the day the music died." It hit a chord in my soul. That was how it felt that day, except that in lieu of the music, it was light itself that died. The light of goodness, decency and freedom, as symbolized by Plaza Miranda, the Hyde Park of the East. That night, you had the sensation of the country being plunged into deepest darkness.

Miraculously, Salonga survived. He himself gives a gripping account of his ordeal in his book, "A Journey of Struggle and Hope." I do not know why we are not marking this event today with the earnestness it deserves.

The other event is better known, though how much better I do not know. That was, of course, the murder of Ninoy Aquino, a case that, like the Plaza Miranda bombing, remains unsolved to this day.

I also remember vividly how that day felt. Where I lived, which was in a BLISS unit in Pag-asa, the afternoon had suddenly turned Lenten. Everyone stayed indoors, including the kids, and it wasn’t because of the intermittent rain amid the sweltering heat. The television stations gave out a collective moan, while Aquino’s loved ones wailed in grief and anger and Luther Custodio stood dumbstruck before a microphone, unable to explain what had happened.

That day also gave off a sense of the music, or light, dying. Of all that we knew to be good, decent and just being blotted out of the world and darkness come to take its place. It was in that deepest darkness of course that Filipinos found the light again, or felt compelled to look for it. Notwithstanding that Cory’s rule did not turn out to be the opposite of Marcos’, as she vowed it would be, I do not see, too, why we are not marking the 18th anniversary of that event with the furious unleashing of remembrance it deserves.

I do not think it is a surprise that South Korea and Japan, the two countries that are locked in a furious debate about Japan’s conduct in the last war, are also the two most prosperous countries this side of the world. I’ve always thought there were very stout links between progress and a sense of right and wrong, between advancement and a sense of justice, between prosperity and a sense of history. It is the capacity to remember that gives purpose, determination and reassurance that one hasn’t strayed too far away from the right path. It is the sense of the past that gives one a sense of the future. The phrase, "a sense of history," does carry with it the double meaning of a sense of provenance and a sense of destiny. The one is inextricably linked to the other, as Rizal himself said.

And I do not think it is a surprise that we who find it so easy to turn tragedy into farce, the present into text jokes and the past into a pit of forgetfulness, are at pains to barge into the 20th century, let alone the 21st. Guess whom the joke is on in the end.


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