If the laws of the land will be followed, we will all participate in the burial of a hero.
With the burial of his bones or of that “body” preserved in wax, we entombed memories of death, disappearances and persecution. Several generations with their memories of the dark years will be questioned. They will all be liars to other generations. Data embedded in their souls will not be validated.
The legalistic has won the war of remembrances once more. In this land, lawyers and justices have a way of settling the treachery of the past, and determining the destiny of a nation by a vote of majority.
We can weep for years but tears are never appreciated as evidences. We can scream and we can shout in rage but, if we are to believe what the lawyers say, it is on the silence of the law that the dictator gets to be buried in this special grave site.
Who says this is no time for blaming others. Well, this is the open season for blaming.
We can blame the nine justices who have declared the burial of Ferdinand E. Marcos legal. We can blame them for not listening to the loud sound of the histories of martial law. And yet, they are not the only ones to be blamed.
We can blame writers and educators who, for some reasons, never saw the wisdom of teaching the facts about martial law.
We blame them for participating in the silenced histories of those years. We blame the politicians whose nature is accommodation, negotiation and compromise—the platforms upon which their survival solely rests. We can even blame the false histories we constructed. We begin with the so-called Edsa Revolution. It sent out the dictator but brought in politics that began in hope and ended, well, at least in hope. For nothing was really changed. We were naïve to accept that with the demise of the dictator came also the death of traditional politics. It was too late for us to realize, if we did realize at all, that patronage politics and the structured inequalities in our country are the bed of politics that honor the wealthy and systematically disenfranchise the masses.
The People Power saw the birth of a new modifier but it never augured the verb of change.
There is the institutional Church. It is quiet when we clamor for its voice. It remained quiet when the new dispensation came with the veneer of reforms. The Church and some of its officials were revealed, at some point, to be participants in the politics of give-and-take.
The books we produced in schools and other learning institutions reserved chapters for owners of mall and companies but did not include significantly the histories of martial law.
And yet, we also have to blame ourselves, the generations who suffered under the dictator. We lost kin and friends during those years but we stopped talking about them. We relied on the cheap tricks of the new politics, the series of administrations, until one regime brought up once more the fate of the dictator.
We never taught our children the evils of martial rule and the dictatorship. We became complacent. Many of us turned to timidity as if such can represent civility. When the talk about the dictator came up, we felt the shadow. He remains a formidable memory out to scare the nation out of its wit.
Today we are still scared of the dictator and we have—not the government, not the Supreme Court, for they can all go to the dogs—but ourselves to blame.
There is one last resort. When the last drop of soil is leveled upon the grave, we can bury our shame and our selfishness with the dictator. We look up and we can start our fight to make this government and all its appointed justices be answerable to this injustice.
The battle is just beginning.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com