Perhaps among the worst developments — pardon the oxymoron — of the last nine years of the Philippines is the impression, created by the country’s two largest political dynasties and their hangers-on, that our democratic experiment consists of nothing but their interests.
As artificial intelligence and social media complicate communication in the public sphere, citizens cannot always be faulted if they are tempted to think, shorthand, that contemporary Filipino life is all about the Dutertes versus the Marcoses.
But Philippine history is about more than these two families and, indeed, about more than the affluent Filipino families that have held power over our isles for so long.
We celebrate Philippine History Month throughout August. This is an opportune moment to remember in our shared story names and faces beyond those of the presently two biggest families, plots and subplots that unfolded far from society’s centers.
In history and historiography, scholars and historians speak of “history from above” and “history from below.” The former records the actions of and circumstances surrounding select main characters. The latter concerns the lives of ordinary folk.
What the Philippine age of the trolls has managed to foist, at least on those who are — to put it charitably — hard-pressed to be critical in information consumption, is a mangled snapshot of recent Filipino history. In this impoverished picture, the Dutertes of the south rose and once-sidelined Marcoses of the north surged, crowding out everyone else above and below.
How well-remembered is the first of August as the dying day of Corazon C. Aquino, the 11th president of the Philippines?
How well-remembered is the same beginning of the month as the death anniversary of Manuel L. Quezon, the country’s second president and father of the Filipino language?
To what extent was yellow systematically demonized over the last decade, such that a hue once symbolic of uncontrived unity among Filipinos of different backgrounds to peacefully overthrow the present president’s paterfamilias, Ferdinand Sr., has become a thing of derision, standing for the unfairly amplified weaknesses of the presidencies of Aquino and her son Benigno III?
How will our nation celebrate Benigno Aquino Jr.’s martyrdom on Aug. 21?
President Marcos Jr. once told journalists that dealing with the atrocities under his father’s watch is a personal matter for his family.
But countries that went through collective trauma, such as South Africa, did not move on by being opaque about the past. They did so through a process of truth-telling and reconciliation in relation to evils such as apartheid.
Collective Filipino moving on carries built-in bugs in the Marcoses’ refusal to revisit truthfully and publicly the elder Marcos regime (1965-1986) with a view to reconciling with its survivors and the Dutertes’ will to sanitize their family name where the war on drugs (2016 to 2022) is concerned.
Thousands were killed, tortured, disappeared and unjustly jailed in both eras. Few were held responsible for the wrongdoings.
In 2009, after President Corazon died, Tomas Osmeña, Cebu City’s then mayor, now vice mayor, promised to initiate building a monument to her in Cebu’s South Road Properties (SRP).
While I hope for that promise’s fulfillment to honor a giant behind our Constitution that we have often betrayed and have yet to fully live up to, it will take more than monuments for us to fill the gaps in our collective memory.
Truth and reconciliation are necessary and will begin with the humble acceptance of those above that there is no shame in confession and the realization of those below, costly beyond all telling, that forgiving will not mean they are losers.
Then any monument, whether to those below like Fr. Rosaleo Romano, martial law desaparecido in Barangay Tisa, and Bladen Skyler Abatayo, four-year-old drug war casualty in Barangay Ermita, or those above like President Corazon at the SRP in Cebu City, will not be but occasionally glorified dust gatherers.
Then we will find in collective healing from historical trauma our rightful, beating heart as we move on.