Can’t we help trivializing everything?

It used to be that when students from the University of the Philippines wanted to protest against graft and corruption, they marched to some public place, raised their strident voices in collective outrage and – passionately singing Bayan Ko! – bared their clenched fists. Two days ago, some UP students hid their faces, cloaked their thoughts and —- relying on their bared asses and adjunct private parts to do the talking – purportedly made an emphatic statement against graft and corruption too.

Media found UP’s most recent demonstration of civic concern extremely newsworthy. Videocams recorded the event for showing in the major TV news programs that evening and several newspapers (not the Philippine Star) – considering the students’ naked denunciation of graft and corruption as fitting material for their reading public — had front page write-ups and photographs of the event the next morning. Judging from the video clips and the news photos, UP people themselves appear to be favorably impressed by the students’ bold move to indict government graft and corruption.

In UP itself, the event when UP students in the buff annually run for a "cause" is referred to as an "Oblation Run". Apparently, the activity has already gained enough status with some people – some students, some faculty members, some administrators and some other members of the UP community —- to warrant being referred to as a university "tradition". To date, no one seems to feel uneasy in associating these allegedly cause-oriented annual streakers with the UP Oblation, a sculptural masterpiece by Guillermo Tolentino showing a nude young man looking up to the heavens and celebrating what an Orphic hymn might be remembered as proclaiming, "Though I am born of the mother earth, yet too am I fathered by the starry skies above."

UP’s Oblation is grounded in the nation’s history, culture and mostly oppressive contemporary realities. Nevertheless, it clearly bespeaks a human spirit reaching out for the stars, daring to actively fashion a national destiny that allows for more people to gain and sustain their deserved humanity.

The UP Oblation’s young nude commits his mind, his heart and his full body — not his arse alone —- in protesting whatever aborts or stunts the Filipino on his way to becoming human. He is ever-willing to give up on creature comforts, to embrace the most onerous difficulties and to shoulder the weightiest loads —- even those that are "sing-bigat ng Sierra Madre" -— in serving his ultimate constituency, the Filipino people. A long list of UP students who have martyred themselves for their nationalist cause is proof that the UP Oblation’s spirit is not lodged in rhetorical commitments but in mostly costly personal decisions to live as one openly says he must, as one who serves his people.

Between the UP Oblation and the so-called "Oblation runners" is a huge difference. The UP Oblation beckons to serious UP students who are fully aware of their responsibilities as "Iskolar ng Bayan," a rather small minority among those who find themselves in the materially best-off campuses of the UP System. They work hard and study hard and finish their formal education soonest so they become less of a public burden sooner.

The current "Oblation runners," on the other hand, are mostly fun-loving students who still have to learn that graft and corruption -— like so many other ills of this country —- are not best approached from the rear or by relying on one’s rear-action talents publicly exposed once very year.

UP authorities and the UP community as a whole should not allow for a trivialization of the UP Oblation. As an academic community, UP people have a responsibility to make their titles, their labels and every entry in their vocabulary properly reflect their objective realities. The UP students who currently streak for whatever they might fancy as their "cause" ought to be delinked from the UP Oblation. Stop referring to their annual activity as an "Oblation Run" and those who participate as "Oblation Runners". They are better associated with Baltazar’s Laki sa Layaw —- those who the poet would describe as "… karaniwang hubad, sa isip at muni, sa bait ay salat."

"Laki sa Layaw Streakers" does not sound bad at all as a monicker for UP students who make bold statements about national concerns even as they insist on modestly covering their faces.