The long road to revolution

I am writing this as our capital begins to dry after a monsoon drenching. Just another year when the Marikina river overflows, thousands do their annual trek through dirty water to temporary shelter, intrepid rescuers brave artificial rapids to save souls with whatever is handy — ropes, tires, inflatable toys or the random jet-ski; and for those of us lucky to remain dry during the deluge the usual gathering of the usual donations — mosquito nets, medicines, canned goods, blankets, clothing and slippers.  I’m not sure when it began but now, as in America, our TV stations hold telethons to raise money featuring attractive show-biz personalities. But there is money for preventing, mitigating and recovering from our annual disasters: we’ve already given it through our taxes, though, judging from recent headlines, the bulk of it has been going for decades to items other than proper capital plumbing. 

There is an impromptu “million man march” that is being planned for Monday to address our government officials’, well, lack of focus on what matters to the people who elected them. Maybe it will just galvanize them to figure out where Napoles is and bring her to some kind of justice. But no, this is not a political piece that has inadvertently strayed into the “Lifestyle” section but a long way of encouraging those who are angry and weary about government indifference to head out to watch a not-so-small movie that opens this week. It will inspire you or, at the very least, provide a roadmap for revolution. People are calling it the “Oprah movie.” You could also call it a “Civil Rights movie” or “an Oscar-baiting movie.”  Because the list of actors in The Butler, a movie based on the true story of a black butler who served a succession of American presidents, reads like a list of Hollywood royalty (Forest Whitaker, Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Fonda, Robin Williams, Cuba Gooding, Jr. just to name a few), as well as a roll call of every major black actor working in Hollywood today, including Lenny Kravitz who seems to have been devised by God to embody cool. A friend pointed out that he has no neck. Still, he is cool, even dressed in a butler outfit, even when he is playing a servant, probably the highest position he could have aspired to, in a not-too-long-ago America.

The Butler is as much about the life of a black man who spends his life serving whites, as it is about the slow and at times necessarily violent progress of the civil rights movement in the United States, a movement that produced leaders as polar opposite as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and forces for change as varied as Michael Jackson, the blues and the Black Panthers — a rights movement that culminated with the election of an American president who, to the world’s surprise, also happened to be black. The Butler makes the case that to stop what it calls “the American holocaust,” to end out and out discrimination, to change the ingrained habits of a nation, what is required is both a hardline opposition to prevailing forces and the more subtle pressure of example. As the actor playing Martin Luther King Jr. says, matter-of-factly, to the disgruntled son of the movie’s butler (and I am paraphrasing): The black servant plays an important role in black history. They disprove, by their example of hard work, the opposite and widespread perception of their capabilities. Their perfect subservience is, in actual fact, subversive.

For a country whose economy is built on the back of remittances from millions of its citizens scattered around the world doing the kind of thankless and invisible work previously and prejudicially forced upon black men and women, I would hope a movie like this would resonate. After all, the very idea of a million man march derives from the actual one, held in 1995, which brought together a half a million strong group of civil rights activists and ordinary citizens in Washington, D.C. for the purpose of drawing the government’s attention to the social ills plaguing the African American community. It had no real “head.” It was called by someone slightly dubious but it made its point. A disempowered minority was tired of being kicked around by the system and wanted to be seen, counted and heard. Sound familiar? 

This week marked the anniversary of the death of Ninoy Aquino who, without much thought for himself or his family, a mark of the usual hero, threw himself into the crosshairs of a dictatorship. But his example, which jarred a dispirited nation to action, was just one of hundreds of other sacrifices by men and women, nameless and faceless to all but those who loved then, who would not back down even if that meant death, jail or, as my grandfather suffered, temporary exile and decades of obscurity. The Butler reminds us that the road to revolution is a long one and that each and every one has a role in effecting it, whether we are a sympathetic outsider, a wife, a son, a student, a member of the oppressing establishment, a militant or a maid. It also reminds us by virtue of its existence — a film headlined and populated by an all-black cast, that, eventually, we win.

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Please send comments to Locsin@outlook.com.