Dare we force a closure on anything? - CHASING THE WIND by Felipe B. Miranda

Philippine history is replete with important questions which have remained largely unanswered. In the last decades of Spanish rule and through the duration of American imperial administration, the role which the native elite or the ilustrados played in the exploitation or liberation of their people had been much obscured to the point where up to now closure of this issue of elite contribution to national liberation remains unsettled.

Of course, within that bigger historical frame one can speak of any number of smaller concerns which up to now beleaguer our historians and may even no longer interest the vast majority of our citizenry. No discomfort attaches to Filipinos now when occasionally they are reminded of the controversial deaths of Andres Bonifacio and Antonio Luna or the highly collaborative character of many of our national politicians with the American authorities.

With the end of the Japanese occupation, Filipinos also confronted the reality of national leaders who collaborated with the alien administration and after a short burst of national interest and political activity, the country apparently decided to allow the issue of collaboration to drift into the darkest pages of Philippine history.

All the way up to Marcos’ declaration of martial law in 1972 and his subsequent dictatorial rule glamorized as "constitutional authoritarianism" lasting up to early 1986, the twin issues of political treason and national plunder surfaced and again appeared to hold the attention of enough Filipinos. Some patriotic energy was focused on these issues for a while but a decade was more than enough to blunt the citizenry’s sense of urgency and by 2000, hardly any Filipino could sustain a sense of outrage against those who initiated and sustained martial law administration.

In 2001, as the country looks back to having barely survived the economic and political crises of the previous year, there are Filipinos who ask whether the ongoing impeachment trial of the highest official of the land may yet yield an outcome where most of the citizenry would finally have a sense of not only of having confronted but also of having successfully concluded a grim national challenge — exacting public accountability of erring public officials.

They wonder whether the senators who are the immediate and formal judges of the trial would decide in such a way as to facilitate the public sense that a public issue had been dealt with in a definitive and just way, a way that would enable most citizens to feel that the matter the senators judged had been disposed of in an indeed fair and honorable way.

There are also those who ask — whatever might be the formal decision of the Senate impeachment court ñ whether the public itself would have the sense that most Filipinos actively participated in the conduct of this trial and shared in the final act either of presidential conviction or acquittal.

And then there are those who are concerned about what it would take to have Filipinos effect a historic closure on this unprecedented issue of presidential impeachment should enough of them believe that no credible trial had indeed taken place.

These are dark, formidable thoughts which paradoxically — as shown by many nations’ providential histories — also could lead to public enlightenment and a resolve to never again allow the dark ages of a peopleís history to ever repeat themselves.

Filipinos have never needed as imperative a sense of closure as in the current case where they try their very own president. Never too have they had to have as demanding a sense of fairness and justice as in this national ordeal.