‘SEPTEMBER’ is Earth, Wind, and Fire’s 1978 happiest sounding masterpiece. But what Filipinos will always remember about the 21st of September is not dancing the night and how the stars stole the night away but Martial Law. September, no matter who sits at Malacañang, will always be the month that will rewind this country’s darkest years.
I grew up during the martial law years and being a child, I was oblivious to it all because Marcos shut down broadcast and print media. We lived in a rented two story-house near Ateneo and at midnight we can hear the loud siren signaling curfew. Lights would be turned off pronto and no one even dared stare out the large windows. And even during the day, our parents kept us mostly indoors.
I hanged out with adults a lot in places where Mama would go like Ninang Wita’s dress shop near San Pedro church or Auntie Rita’s house near Fernandez Piano School. Ninong Donyong introduced me to the problems of the coconut farmers. It was his daily habit to read the newspaper and it was from him that I learned about boycotts staged in Manila. Not only were dailies late, magazines and books were also a rarity. Censorship was heavy and even for cartoons. So, we feasted on old copies of Life, Reader’s Digest, Time magazines that spoke of a better life somewhere else and at times, about the contorted times Filipinos lived in. TV shows were also aired a week late and that included my menu of Sesame Street, Bewitched, Star Trek, Voltes V and others. From hushed conversations I would know of Uncle Flor’s son going underground and heard about the NPAs. I was 9 or 10 years old when I first heard about someone “going underground”. I imagined tunnels like Alice in Wonderland or huts in hills like the Shire’s, but they were not.
Admittedly it was only in college when the big picture of Martial Law became clear. The library became my waterhole and was blessed to find friends and acquaintances who were politically savvy. I grieved over what my childhood lost because of Martial Law but it was diminutive to what others lost. And by this, I mean “about 70,000 people imprisoned while 34,000 tortured, and 3,240 killed during Martial Law from 1972 to 1981” (Amnesty International). In 2018, the Human Rights Victims’ Claims Board released the final list consisting of 11,103 names who will receive monetary compensation. This only made up 14% of a total of 75,749 applicants. HRVC is a quasi-judicial body mandated by law “to receive, evaluate, process, and investigate” reparation claims made by victims of human rights violations under the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ Martial Law. Struggling lower middle-class families like mine felt the impact of the country’s stock of debts that grew exponentially in the late 1970s ($8.2 billion in 1977) and burst into a full-blown crisis by 1983 ($24.4 billion) leading to the diaspora of Pinoy professionals and giving birth to countless dysfunctional families.
Fifty years after, the junior steps back into power but instead of acknowledging the atrocities of Martial Law, he touts it as the Golden Age of the country. But if he listens intently to one of his advisers, Clarita Carlos: “So tanggapin mo ‘yan. Then make a categorical declaration [that] ‘these things will not happen in my administration.’ How difficult is it to say that?”.
Someone should loop Prof Carlos 24/7 for BBM and his ilk and be this administration’s LSS.