FEBRUARY 25 was a Monday, so I woke up early to prepare to bring my sons to their schools only to find everybody in the house still asleep. When the younger son woke up, I asked him why he was not getting ready for school. He reminded me of what I forgot. “No classes, Edsa day,” he said.
So I remembered. This government may not like people to remember the 1986 Edsa people power uprising but previous administrations have found ways to institutionalize the memory of that triumphant struggle. Like the simple declaration of Feb. 25 as a holiday.
With the day becoming more leisurely, I decided to surf cable channels. It turned out that Cinema One was showing again that morning “Eskapo,” the film that probably helped Cebuano Sergio Osmena III win in his first senatorial bid years ago. Coincidentally, Serge O is once again running for a Senate seat in the May elections.
I dismissed the film during its first run years ago as a mere tool for politicking. It is about the escape of Serge and Eugenio Lopez Jr., members of two of the many clans persecuted by the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, from detention in 1974. Serge and Geny were among the thousands arrested when Marcos declared martial law on Sept. 21, 1972.
I decided to watch the film only after I read in the opening credits that the script was written by one of my idols, Jose “Pete” Lacaba, brother of Emmanuel Lacaba, who was slain while fighting the Marcos dictatorship during the martial law years. I thought that the film must have been more than what I gave it credit for in the past. Besides, Chito Roño, a competent director, was at the film’s helm.
I wasn’t disappointed, especially in scenes that depicted the early stages of military rule: the arrests, the illegal detentions, a bit of the tortures and other excesses, like the taking over by Marcos and his cronies of ABS-CBN, Meralco and other Lopez family businesses. For a while, I was reliving the horrors of the Marcos dictatorship and thankful once again for the Edsa uprising that ousted it.
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I was in Southwestern University (SWU) on Sunday to be both speaker and judge in editorial and column writing during the annual conference of Central Visayas student journalists (senior high school and college) at the school’s former medicine building. SWU, formerly owned by the Aznars, is now with the Phinma group.
I have many fond memories of the place. I grew up in Sitio Kawayan in Barangay Sambag 2, a village separated from the Aznar Coliseum only by a vacant lot owned by a Chinese businessman. I spent my elementary education days in City Central School along Jones Ave. (now Osmeña Blvd.) walking every class day from our place (specifically B. Rodriguez Ext.) to the school using a shorter route that crossed the SWU campus. We would eat our “bawon” (lunch meal, usually rice, egg and dried fish) in the cave-like part of the garden formed by the branches and leaves of an old tree. The place is less forbidding now.
It was in the SWU campus where my social awareness developed. It was the last school I attended before I decided to embrace fully the struggle to effect social change.