It feels great to finally be back in a city that’s close to all the other major cities in Manila; to be back in Fairmount, in our home, with my family. And the sweet thing about this “come back” is that my parents suddenly had the urge to celebrate Edsa day. If you are a Filipino, you know what that means. If you are from a different country and has been inclined to knowing the big historical events world wide, then you would also know what that means. IF you’re none of the above, here’s the gist: It basically marks the day when the Filipino people had successfully ousted the late President Marcos (who put the country under military rule for decades) through peaceful means right at the heart of the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue. For more deets, click here.
So we bought pizza and beers to go and we had dinner at my sister’s house where we were almost complete: my parents, my eldest sister, my brother-in-law, my two other siblings, and Ozzy.
Through every slice of pizza I was munching on (which was always so good with a chug of lady beer), a memory of debate between my dad and I kept bugging my thoughts. “The rate of maturation in my generation was faster than your generation’s,” my dad said, “you knew of no wars, you didn’t go through the things we went through.” I remember debating with him endlessly and couldn’t believe he was throwing me one of the famous parental lines that go “our time was different.” But the pizza, having messed up my thought processes, made me flip the thought over and over in my head. And before I could even say “beer”, I found myself to this conclusion: I can’t blame their generation for thinking that way.
My dad was an activist against the Marcos regime. He was one of those students who printed paraphernalia at dawn, hidden to great extents from authorities. This was the reason he was sent by my grandfather to study at my current provincial university — the farther he was from the heart of the battle, the better. Some of his friends disappeared, never to be seen again, and the remaining were left to assume the worst. They sang nationalistic songs and kept nationalistic books, all of which were hidden. Some friends can be friends, while others can be traitors. Some days, according to my dad, you wouldn’t even know who was who. All this straight from a Les Miserables act.
I read somewhere that when a person is subjected to death (of any form), he or she gains a higher level of understanding of what it is to be alive. The 70′s for the country brought upon death of sorts — freedom being the most significant. It was small scale compared to wars between or among countries. Yet it appears to be more devastating for the destruction came from within, a Filipino versus a Filipino. Of which only a Filipino was able to put an end. It scarred the country but it paved for a greater movement that gave way to a realization of our potential; it paved for a more livable environment for my generation.
I gotta hand it to them, that was their war, and that was an experience of death that woke them. But I still don’t agree with my dad’s assumption about the maturity of my — our — generation. Our war is different, our experience of death is different. Our war is spiritual by nature; our war is the seemingly improbable reversal of mother nature’s condition.
When we choose to make a stand, we include ourselves in that war. And every single time we choose to stand for our beliefs, we gain a higher level of understanding of what it is to be alive. Our fight is unique from our parents’ — just as how our future children’s wars will be from ours.
