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.