It took a mindless judgment call by presumably well-meaning Ateneo alumni to re-ignite our anger at Ferdinand Marcos’ martial law regime, and seek drastic measures to ensure that our educational system is not nurturing generations of Filipinos who have no appreciation of our horrible martial law past.
Last Monday, we learned on Facebook that Imelda Marcos was the guest of honor at the 40thanniversary celebration of the Ateneo Scholarship Foundation held at the Ateneo campus in Loyola Heights. Apparently, Imelda once made a generous contribution to the ASF when she was First Lady, and the officers of the foundation found it apropos to invite her to their anniversary celebration, on campus, where she met, shared a meal, and danced with the cream of Ateneo’s crop, the ASF scholars.
Once the photos of Imelda dancing with the ASF scholars hit Facebook, social media erupted in indignation. Ateneo, how could you forget the excesses of the evil martial law regime? What message are you sending to your students having Imelda as your guest? Was it good manners and right conduct at play here? Or misplaced gratitude for her largesse? Or was it plain mindlessness?
The Ateneo quickly apologized for the faux pas, and its president has assured us that the university has not forgotten the horror of the Marcos regime. But setting aside the question of what they remember, perhaps we should ask what Ateneo students actually know about what happened during the martial-law period.
Our young people have grown up blissfully unaware of what their elders went through under the thumb of the Marcoses and their cronies. Do those Ateneo scholars who hammed it up with Imelda at the anniversary know that during her heyday, thousands of people were murdered, kidnapped, raped, salvaged, jailed, and tortured by rampaging soldiers and police, with countless others unaccounted for, while she traipsed and shopped and partied around the world on the people’s account?
It was a very dark period our country and people went through for 14 horrible years from 1972 to 1986. Unfortunately, the memory of it has been tucked away somewhere deep in the national consciousness, practically forgotten, which would explain why a Ferdinand Marcos Jr. can get elected to the Senate and even talk about aspiring for the presidency, and Imelda Marcos can get invited to party at the Ateneo campus.
But all is not lost. The Ateneo can make things right by taking the lead in restoring and institutionalizing the memory of the Marcoses’ martial law regime into the national consciousness, so that present and future generations will never forget its cost to the Filipino people.
My friend Cathy Babao has suggested, on Facebook, for Ateneo to create a course on Martial Law that would be mandatory for all incoming freshmen. There is no lack of resources for such a course. There are books, documentaries and movies about Martial Law and its victims. There is a human-rights museum at the Bantayog ng mga Bayani, a wall of remembrance engraved with names of the heroes of the Martial Law years, and a monument to those who gave up their liberty and their lives during our anni horribiles. And then, there are the survivors of the horrors of martial law, who can talk to today’s innocents about the torture, murder, and mayhem they went through.
The course should discuss power and how it corrupts absolutely. But more important, it should present and discuss how the country’s military and police were manipulated, co-opted, and converted into a private army serving the interests only of one man, his family, and their cronies. It should explore the monopolies in the trade of basic agricultural products that were controlled and manipulated by Marcos and his cronies to the detriment of small farmers. And it should extoll the courage and heroism of the Filipinos who resisted one-man rule at the cost of their jobs, properties, security, peace of mind, and, ultimately, their lives.
At this time, when our schools have become very competitive and focused on developing top graduates to meet the demands of high-end job markets, some essentials tend to be set aside or downplayed, such as history, anthropology, culture and the arts. While our schools strive to excel in business, management and the sciences, our history textbooks go under-developed. Today’s kids may know their math, calculus, and computer programming, but do they know Chino Roces, Lorenzo Tañada, Jose W. Diokno, Jovito Salonga, Edgar Jopson, Evelio Javier, and other heroes who stood up to the dictatorship?
So, perhaps one good thing that has come out of the ASF’s bad judgement is a wake-up call reminding us that we may have allowed ourselves to forget the evil embodied in Marcos and his martial law regime, the greed and vanity of Imelda, and their murderous and kleptocratic conjugal dictatorship.
Young Filipinos must know the past to be able to understand the present and change the future. To paraphrase what the Ateneo’s foremost alumnus, Jose Protacio Rizal, famously wrote, if you don’t know where you came from, you’ll never get to where you want to go.
We must do this before it is too late, for the sake of our children and grandchildren, lest one day they find another Marcos or a clone in Malacañang, lording it over the Filipino people once again.