When New Years Are Gone

Like the leaves of an old calendar, memories fade and fly away with the passage of time. There are events not long ago that cannot be revisited anymore. There are stories beyond remembering. They are in a file that consciousness could not retrieve.

What favorite scenes in your childhood are now sealed in the chamber named forgotten? Of course you cannot answer because amnesia has gotten the better of them.

Such, are some fragments of history that have helped form our present. Such, are cherished moments in the past that try as you may, are already beyond capture.

I sometimes ask what New Year celebration in the past strikes most. Hard to say. Each one would always be the same. It is thought to bring something new, but ushers more of the same.

The stroke of midnight slithers to the first hour of the new day. What leap in time has happened? What divide has been bounded?

Hey it’s New Year! Yeah, the seconds tick towards the dead of the night then erupts in mass ecstasy, so short and ephemeral it easily fizzles unto the quiet break of dawn.

The burst of revelry, the explosion of fireworks, and what else humans can do herald the anticlimax. They do not climax, because too many times of doing the expected have made it banal, like waking up in the morning to the same sky framed by the old familiar window.

Why New Years are not the best remembered is obvious. They fortuitously become an insignificant flash in the time continuum, a human-marked point of shift to another cycle that blurs to nothingness.

Even the havoc on lives and property wrought by firecrackers and accidental firing stops to matter so soon. Things have become predictably repetitive that the burned, injured, decapitated and just shocked have a dull reception waiting at hospitals ahead of schedule.

The millennium crossover in 2000 once stood out. Billions of folks throughout the world made much of the imaginary divide. They strove to pin great meaning to a switch of two one-thousand years.

Visualize a thousand years of religion infused into human social history cutting off like a capsule of a rocket ship, and vanishing into the cosmos. But no matter how, it could not be frozen in eternity. In a little while, humanity would leave the sensation and go back to religion and the same old reality.

The counting of hours and days proceeds with a future to worry about. Humans do not have a way of untangling from the past, the lens in which they see the future. The ghost of a time gone haunts them in a state of non-existence recognized as tomorrow.

So this is what the New Year is about: tomorrow in the sights of yesterday. For tomorrow does not appear as tomorrow. It appears as experience waiting to happen again, a reality that is but a dream, for to become truly real it must be the present.

To be truly real, it must be undergone, and thereby cease being a future. It must also be an experience no longer in the past, but in the here and now.

Can you make it your resolution to have no more New Year’s resolutions? Only New Year reflections. Can you care no more to see the future, more so from the lens of the past? Only to open doors to knowing and learning afresh.

Memory is the flaming cylinder of the trajectory streaking in the outer space above the speed of sound. Once fired off, it detaches and disappears into the celestial ranges. But if encountered yet again, stare not at its core, for it will look back with hypnotic spell to lull the unwary to a dream-like stupor.

Imagine time being abolished by a new charter of man. There are no more hours, days and years. There are only changes, the coming and going of phenomena, physical and spiritual matter in a flux, things vanishing and becoming in the plain of the permanent present.

Folks do not mark a year as new or old. They do not have anything to do with any year at all anymore. There is no end, only transition. Consciousness now perceives the aspect of eternity.

History won’t be written again by avowed witnesses merely wanting the people to see it their way. It will be removed from the simple chronology of events, and interpretation in accordance with someone’s biases and intentional misconceptions.

No one will have misgivings anymore. No one will excruciate in the graveyard of the dead past. History will no longer be a piece of writing within the covers of a thick book. It will be no other than the living reality of the masses shaping the present constantly achanging.

When life is not measured anymore by the pages of the calendar, or subjected to the hands sweeping around the clock’s dial, mankind will be out of the time divides. With such, the psycho-physical benefits will be tremendous this space is too miniscule to write them.

Pressure for one will stop knocking on one’s door or waking up someone in the morning who is enjoying his prolonged detachment. Deadlines will cease to nag. Urgency along with its tensions will keep quiet. Schedules will desist from turning the hounded into nervous wrecks.

The giant waves of revelers all over the globe will save breath from not blowing horns, eardrums from not dragging cans on streets, fingers from not lighting firecrackers, and a beating heart from the silence of one powerful blast nobody expects or wants to snuff an ill-fated welcome of the New Year.

The Countryman In The Cusp Of Change

Bimz Kab

All in a day! The doctor sighed. There is still time to write Mi Ultimo. There is still time to paint the chill of a fiery dawn.

Fervent thoughts raced as minutes flew. Which is the one to capture in the flitting moments? Confusion could not be denied. A mild panic scratched the calm of the man. Tomorrow is a terrible day. Who can change it?

The land awaits the birth of a nation, he should not fear change. The mother principle has conceived the child, and no force could already prevent its arrival. Uncanny how the evening looked like tomorrow’s great hope. What they were going to execute was more of their old rule than his apostasy.

The eve of a man’s death was heralding a new life. No power could defy it anymore. What folly of the oppressors to force it. In the morning one temporal existence will go. But a new beginning for the people who have long languished under oppression was as sure to come as his end.

The doctor healed not only the sick. He has begun to treat society afflicted with cancer. He has sought to knock out darkness and fear and invigorate his fellow countrymen with a sense of greatness in collective identity. By that he turned a misconceived inferior race into an angry one.

The alien tumour was due to be excised in the course of future events. Surgery by a social upheaval was at hand. El Filibusterismo II was nearing the cataclysmic finish to an order.

Implanted still in the womb of the old society, change has taken a life of its own. The islands were awakening, morphing into a skein of force poised to unleash a deathblow to the tottering order. The revolution was already in unstoppable progress.

But how the doctor avoided the word! Instead of revolution, he chose reform. Instead of nation, he used fatherland. Though he helped the masses grip the idea of the islands’ radical break with the past, though he shared in the conception of the nation, he balked at its birth.

Dr. Jose Rizal was not prepared for two things: a land turning into war, and a people rising into self-rule and nationhood. He excruciated at the crossroads of history, refusing involvement. Had he accepted the uprising and even heeded the call to sit as head of the revolutionary councils, the archipelago would have rendezvoused with a different fate. Another die would have been cast.

Accepting instead a destiny minted by the oppressors, the doctor separated himself from the mainstream of change. Independence was dawning. Political solidarity was sweeping the islands. He pleaded his cause with the rulers.

The soon to be martyr yet preferred to stay in the cold grip of the night hoping colonialism will vanish of its own. But it did not let him see the fullness of the next day.

Darkness tried to extinguish his light. But the flame of awakening which he ignited all the more grew like a flame mistakenly doused with gasoline. His extinguishing at the Bagumbayan field stoked collective anger. The simmering coals leaped into gigantic fires. Soon a conflagration engulfed the archipelago.

The betrayal of the citizen of the world who chose to be colonial subject to the end hastened the demise of colonialism in these parts. For this, the doctor would turn out yet the better countryman. The people revered him even when he differed.

With him at the helm, the making of history could have been piloted to a more desirable outcome. But he was not in the position to marshal the course. He seemed to be avoiding risking his legacy, which the blood of martyrdom would purify. This was the awakening of a Filipino nation, nothing more nothing less .

In life, Dr. Rizal pulled his countrymen away from insurrection. How history pivots on the stupidity of rulers. It was stupid to murder a subject who until the end would not have anything to do with the plot to topple them.

As divine plot would have it, the meting of his death pushed the ouster of colonial rule vigorously like never before. With that he rested. Morir es descansar. To die is to rest. Death also rested the leading light’s steadfast refusal of revolution.

One of the great historical paradoxes would seize the moment again. The doctor did not renounce allegiance to Spain. He renounced the idea of revolution giving due course to nationhood. He was not for severance and war against the masters. But they cut him, thus fuelling the flames of rebellion.

A people about to rise up in arms held him as a guiding light. But Rizal was only for reengineering the colonial order into a new ruler-subject relationship based on fair governance, justice, participation and few liberties. With his execution, the tearing of cedulas proceeded.

Like the Katipunan founder and revolutionary leader Andres Bonifacio, the intellectual Rizal could have been the first head of a newly born republic. But the destiny of the two converged in violent death. The former by treachery of his countrymen, the latter by treachery of the country he pledged allegiance to.

They were not to taste liberation and self-destiny. They were only to embed the gene of a future charted by the shedding of blood for freedom. They were saved from its disheartening outcomes.  

When It's Time To, Quit

Has there been a moral lesson or message of a story that advises to quit? It seems unthinkable. 

Well, the folk ballad Gambler sang by Kenny Rogers says so. The lyrics goes: "You've got to know when to hold on, know when to fold on, know when to walk away, no when to run." 

There is just an instance in life's many battles when the better option is to quit and run. When the going is no longer a happy one, cease. 

Do you just toss from one turbulent strait to another, pass from yesterday’s failure to today’s, and carry nothing more than a tiresome existence every day? Then the only better way is to call off and cool down. 

So, what does that actually mean? Does it mean ending life, or to be blunt about it, committing suicide? 

Think about it. Doing a harakiri is not quitting, but insisting to solve the problem the wrong way. The one who takes his/her life still wants to wrestle with the same problem up to the last breath.

The gambler advises: "You never count your money, when your sitting at the table, there'll be time enough for counting when the dealing's done." 

To quit is to stop sitting at the table and have noting anymore of the dealing. It is to no longer respond to the challenge, just fold up, and walk away. 

Don’t think it is giving up life, or stopping to expect results. it is giving yourself a new leash on life, and expecting different results than the ones you no longer want.

I have had my share of bad luck, and times are when it just comes aplenty. I have had moments of defeat or fall when recovery was neither an option or possibility. In those times, anxiety often turns to fright over the thought that you're gonna stay there forever.

As frustration lapses into a slow choking depression, awakening jolts me: the default command called life ordering to beat it. How? Simple. Stop thinking of getting back. Quit striving to recover.

Sometimes you are pained by the feeling of being worthless, for not achieving something. But when you stop dwelling on your usual sense of achievement, you are actually paving the way to outcomes never thought of. You achieve things beyond expectation.

I have found out that in imminent defeat, the best luck comes with the option to fight no more. It may not be the great generals’ idea of brilliant strategy. But the purpose is to win yet in another battle by taking the quickest way out.

When the tide is turning against you, to abandon the battlefield is to fight yet in others. When the old beaten route is already full of obstructions and treacherous holes, get off. Reach your destiny via a different one. 

When you have lost track and the stars are no longer up there to guide you, when you no longer see the familiar skylines, and when you seem to be going farther and farther away from the old bearings, that is when you have arrived at a new haven.

After the fears, you open your eyes to a world never hitherto explored. And you stumble into the joy of experiencing new ways of living.

Delimit the possible. Set the sails towards the uncharted waters. It is when there are no other choices anymore that the only one you have must be the best choice. Quit picking.

The journey may be worthier than any destination. Embark on it and behold magnificent panoramas and horizons not shown before. Meet the fresh situations of existence.

Be not afraid to get lost. There is always a path where you find joy and happiness without setting goals or planning how to get there. The finest journey can be the one unplanned.

Five Days That Shook The World

by BIMBO CABIDOG

At around eight in the evening of February 25, 1986 long reigning dictator Ferdinand Marcos fled the country. He ruled for 20 years. 

Marcos's flight ended a dispensation marked by the death of democracy, the curtailment of liberties and basic rights of the people, and rapacious plunder. For fourteen years, the country reeled under a regime of whimsical decrees by one man, serving only the narrow interests of his family, his underlings in the military top brass, fattened bureaucrats, and business cronies. 

On record, more than 70,000 activists and oppositors were incarcerated with no warrant of arrest, nor due process in a fair court of justice. Security forces tortured, vanished without trace, or murdered dissenters and mere suspects docketed as subversives. State operators clamped down media, leaving only the government's mouthpieces to air and print. Legitimate businesses were squeezed to bankruptcy or seized.

In the last three years of the dictatorship, political and economic turbulence buffeted the country. This followed as a result the treacherous murder of the former senator and returning opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr. at the Manila International Airport tarmac. The people saw foul play at his death in the hands of Marcos's military thugs. From then on, rallies, marches and instant noise barrage erupted almost by the day. The financial system crashed. The economy took a nose-dive. Firms closed shop. Banks went on holiday. The Gross Domestic Product plunged to year-on-year negative growth. Heavily indebted and cash-strapped, the government tottered on the brink of collapsing.

Lenin, socio-political theorist who sired the October 1917 Revolution of Russia, wrote that a profound revolutionary crisis exists when the rulers can no longer rule in the old way, and the people likewise can not be ruled anymore in the same old way. During the tumultuous period of the citizenry's awakening and spirited political action from 1983-1986, the battle cry in the streets was: "Sobra na, tama na!" The oppressed have had enough of official thievery and repression that was making their lives hell. It was impossible anymore to live under the old order.

The end would finally be brought by a mismanaged situation that snowballed into the biggest crisis of Marcos's rule. A group of junior military officers, naming themselves Reform the Armed Forces Movement, plotted a putsch. The loyal minions of Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Fabian Ver uncovered the conspiracy and nipped it at the incipient stage. The fleeing mutineers were driven to hole up at the Defense headquarters in Camp Aguinaldo for survival. That was where the big trouble that culminated in Marcos’s downfall sprang.

On the afternoon of February 21, Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile joined the rebellious bunch. I was taking a leisurely stroll along a street in San Juan City that afternoon, full of thoughts. No day passed that we didn’t feel already the insurrectionary atmosphere emanating from the relentless rallies and marches around Metro Manila and nearby localities. They have intensified in frequency and force after the wholesale cheating by Marcos of presidential candidate Cory Aquino, in the just concluded snap election. Walking near a store, I heard the big news from a radio inside: Marcos’s top henchman, Enrile, has defected. It jolted me from reverie, daydreaming of how the vanguard progressive bacilli of the current movement could escalate further the mass protests.

Enrile himself made the stunning announcement. Until evening, the story went on and on, on the AM band. At first, I could not wrap my mind around the fact that the Defense Minister, an unquestionably big figure second only in authority to Marcos, has cast his lot with the young officers and turned against him. The news later was that they have already barricaded themselves at Camp Aguinaldo in open defiance. At that critical moment, the nation was luckily tuned in to the frequency broadcasting the story.

I was instinctively suspicious, as my comrades in the radical left were. What were they up to? Whereto was their military adventurism heading? At the very least, we had to hold it with some caveat. Only the rallies of the basic masses and politicized middle forces, facing the truncheons and water cannons and even tear gas and live bullets of Marcos’s centurions could be relied upon.

But somehow, the Enrile-RAM break seemed legit enough to ponder favorable scenarios. The crisis of rule was building. The officers’ rebellion may already be part as well as outcome of it. The fact that Mr. Martial Law Administrator himself was on board put Marcos in real bad shape. The situation would further exacerbate when Constabulary Chief General Fidel Ramos crossed to the side of the mutineers.

The month of February brought the most ominous signs of the times. Outcomes by the day were becoming unpredictable and fast, such as the perfect storm brewing at Edsa. Initially the people came to Edsa to rally behind the call of Manila Archbishop Cardinal Sin for support with prayers and warm bodies to the beleaguered military rebels. The first gathering was to put up a moral buffer to shield them from the wrath of Marcos by dissuading potential attackers from proceeding with a bloody assault.

But the objective quickly shifted. When support waxed into a groundswell, the gathering rapidly evolved into full-blown uprising. It had its sights now on Marcos’s ouster.

The peaceful presence of millions of citizenry obviated resort to arms. It helped that the massive civilian outpouring occurred in the nuclei of the state’s armed apparatuses. Wedged between the country’s two most strategic camps, it held to a standstill Marcos’s invincible military machine. The locus brought the popular insurrection in full view of the world. A global consensus soon formed in favor of it. Meanwhile, because of the accessibility, aid or augmentation with more warm bodies easily reached it in minutes.

On the third day, our group of leftist militants, sans the usual red banners and streamers, joined the throngs. We noticed a column of armored personnel carriers, cannon-mounted tanks with machine guns jutting from turrets, and soldiers fully geared for battle moved in on a road perpendicular to the bulk of demonstrations. But the assault regiment was stopped on its tracks with flowers and prayers by the ranks of the religious – nuns, priests, seminarians and lay brothers. The peaceful and prayerful Edsa warriors hedged their bodies in front of the machines. The more intrepid clambered up the decks. 

Layer after layer, on the long stretch of Edsa from Cubao to Ortegas, the rising citizenry formed a massive wall of warm human bodies now called people power. It deterred any planned military advance and deflected the outbreak of a shooting war with nothing but a moral force.

The fifth day of the standoff was hot, but spine tingling. Early in the afternoon, our ranks from the left broke off with the multitude at Edsa and transferred to Mendiola. Around Quezon City, especially along Aurora Boulevard up to Sta. Mesa, Manila, and the stretch of E. Rodriguez up to Espana, communities have gone out to barricade streets and major thoroughfares against further plying of vehicles especially by the loyalist soldiers of Marcos. It was also to prepare for the Welgang Bayan (People’s Strike) the next day. 

By dark, when we reached the corner of Mendiola and Legarda, our contingent has already waxed into a huge throng. Thousands of people trudged behind us. squeezing into Recto Avenue, from the bridge up to Quezon Boulevard. Thousands more occupied the adjoining street of Legarda. We started cutting the rolls of concertina wires making up the Malacanang security barrier at the bridge.

Bystanders have climbed and perched on ledges and awnings of buildings. They shouted “Pasok! Pasok!” (Enter, Enter). But we have already slipped our banners and streamers inside the protective perimeter zone of the palace, even before the clearing of the wires. 

Except for the buzzing of the crowds around the area, the night fell into quiet like the few seconds of suspended breath before a hanging. Beams of light from the full moon lent a romantic sheen to the leaves of the trees along the sides of the San Beda and Centro Escolar colleges. Suddenly, the big choppers chugged. They quickly loomed in the moonlit sky then vanished. 

As soon as we made the wide breach on the rolled barricades, the heaving crowds behind us broke loose. Like the floodwaters of a spilling dam, they roared down to the gates and tall fences of Malacanang.

Minutes after the appearance of the choppers, we got the official news from the transistor radio comrades always brought along in that time of marches. The ailing Ferdinand Marcos, members of his family, and close aides have left. They flew out of the country on board the two Sikorsky helicopters we saw earlier courtesy of the United States government. 

The strongman, impaled by lupus, landed in Hawaii where he would spend the last days of his life in malignant illness and self-exile. The formidable ruler, whose son once boasted of owning the Philippines, got a small piece of real estate to seek refuge from his angry countrymen in the territory of his once abiding but later abandoning imperialist ally.

I have used the first person point of view in portions of this story to stress that I am relating them from living memory. My sharing, the telling of other witnesses, and the account of professional chroniclers could already piece from different angles and perspectives the full narrative of that complex political experience that our people underwent, more than three decades ago. So, what did those great developments say to us today?

In moments of overwhelming trouble and suffering, the people would always look for a hero to swoop in and save them. The dependence on messiahs or personas of great prowess - often more imagined than real, only prolongs the problem without solution. The saga of Edsa showed that the hero everyone may have been waiting for was no one else but the people themselves. Yes, the masses showed up to be the real heroes, making history by their collective action. One such historical episode was the people power upheaval at Edsa.

The spirited pace of events during the five Edsa days that shook the world portrayed one thing: the masses were doing them. No group, organization, coalition or powerful personality, whatever their claims of might and all-encompassing thought, could have done such epic. It was a history solely made by the people: from subservience to liberation, from 14 years of enduring tyranny to the brief moment of vanquishing it.

The old order rapidly crumbled with the refusal of the people to be passive any longer, and be condemned to chaff under the iron fist of Marcos. Instead, they seized their fate. The massive political upheaval was clearly about them already taking into their hands the determination of how things must be. Such was the much talked-about spirit of Edsa.  

Thirty one years since, we still see a lot of unmet expectations. The same ills have slipped back. Chronic blaming and partisan finger-pointing, instead of concrete solutions, prevail. Have people given up on deep economic, political and social change? Where is the spirit of Edsa now?

After the euphoria and nursing of great expectations, the Edsa victory soon lapsed into living again under the same conditions and situations of existence as before for the vast majority .  In a short time, the nation's collective hope would start to fade on the promise of transformation borne by the hours and days of sleepless vigils, tireless marches, resonant chants, dogged unrest, contagious solidarity, courage, and heroism of ordinary folks that the world praised and other peoples, confronting similar tyranny, later emulated.

There have been great visions, visions that were dashed. Edsa today may even be worse, a boulevard of broken dreams, of MRT woes, choking traffic that waste billions of pesos in fuel and man hours, tong collection by traffic police and MMDA enforcers, issues to provide cannon fodder for opportunistic politicians’ propaganda war, and many things that we hate about ourselves. 

Monday morning quarterbacks continually blame leaders and government for our pains, even as scholars long debate the difference between people power and people’s power and what they are to the aspiration of fundamental change. But do they matter?

We avoid talking about the surrender of the people’s option at change once more to the returning elite, traditional politicians, and their petty running dogs, right after the epic. The masses relinquished the power in their hands, not knowing what it was and what to do with it. They gave it back to the re-established cliques of the ongoing ruling classes in the merry-go-round of power.

And the new ones lost no time in seizing economic spoils, dividing bureaucratic largess, pocketing sequestered wealth, and consolidating stranglehold always to the exclusion of the great masses, no matter what Constitution they have.

Was there anything to hope in the first place? All the boasts of politicians, economists, bureaucrats, prophets of big business, academics and self-claimed experts about having the magic solution turn out to be empty. It is so, because they are not supposed to solve the problem rooted in the social structure. 

So again, what did Edsa taught? A confluence of factors and breaking events – many of them by miraculous coincidence, brought to a close the fourteen dark years of Marcos's rule. But they could not have progressed towards it without the meeting of the minds and fusion of spirit by millions of people wanting to have no more of the dictator. Consciousness came first before the action. 

The latter is important to take note. Edsa was a long hard fight from the start that went back even long before the watershed assassination of Ninoy Aquino. But the fight was not about scoring a decisive or strategic or complete victory by whatever force and stratagem. Not yet! It was about winning the hearts and minds of the masses, raising their consciousness, arousing them to take action, and educating them to take the proper action. Alas, this phase has been limited. It fueled a mass momentum that did not went beyond Edsa.

The fight has been there all along egging to be fought, way before the pale of two million people struck by sudden heroism. You can wage a protracted or short struggle, kill as many agaw-armas victims as you can, collect as many blood debts as you can, increase the tactical offensives, build strategic bases in forest hinterlands, shout the loudest in rallies, burn the biggest effigies caricaturing the ugliest face of the enemy, bar traffic for thousands of cursing commuters, be very good at opposing. But if you don't fight for the heart and mind of the people, and fight effectively well, you can waste two more generations in a war that is unwinnable.

My comrades in the left always taught it, but never really learned it. Arouse. Mobilize. Organize. Before talking of reaching parity in arms, and encircling the cities from the countryside, arouse and mobilize the masses in their millions. Before talking of building red bases and hoisting organs of power, that in a bout of self-delusion is proudly touted to already see the outskirt of territorial government happening soon and very quick, arouse and mobilize the barrio folks, the dwellers in the sitios, and the poor cramping like sardines in blighted slums.

Once upon a time, the spirit of a united and active citizenry shone in five days that shook the world. Ordinary folks showed heroism in full display. Now the spirit is just a ghost, more belittled by the rulers than feared. Will its might of epic proportion shine again?