Man Plans, Nature Disposes

BIMBO CABIDOG

The Homo sapiens is the only species that thinks. It uses the thought process to plan. Planning remade the original world of creation after its thought.

Wherever he went, thinking man left a distinct mark. In fact, in the latter part of his existence, he has so changed the Earth, that almost everything in it now bears the imprint of human hands.

The unique capacity to chart outcomes started to determine what the future will be, still in the hunting-gathering stage of human-social development.

The period was around 12,000 years ago, when Man’s activity was solely the procurement of food, foraging in the wild savannahs and woodlands. At this time, the specie already exhibited a characteristic that separated it from the rest of the animal kingdom: it planned and organized to dominate the overpowering forces of nature.

Planning is thinking and deciding. Thinking would become more prominent during the succeeding epoch of the herdsman when humans no longer hunted but pastured animals for food. Animal husbandry ushered a big leap in their advancement.

The domestication of animals and the advent of horticulture (planting) radically changed the mode of human existence. Humans no longer lead a nomadic life. They settled. With settlement, geographically permanent human communities rose.

As they progressed, method more and more determined living instead of brute force. It later spurred off rapid social development.

Of all species in the animal kingdom, only the Homo sapiens show planning. Thinking turned man into a rational animal. Rationality further advanced human intelligence. It evolved language, philosophy, and then science.

The phrase, “the best laid plans of men,” became popular some time ago. They may certainly be credited with where mankind is now, a stage characterized by phenomenal progress in the way it lives. What the world is today can trace to man’s ability to plan.

But did planning really bear out every development, every progress, or every advance? Or did they actually happen beyond the best laid plans of men? Where they intuited, not deliberated?

The discoveries and inventions that brought phenomenal change in the lives of human beings seemed to be intuitive. Many of the stories about them tell that they occurred in a flash of the moment, the lighting of an idea different from what men have used to think.

They did not result from following a charted course. They resulted from veering off course, blazing a new trail, breaking with the past. They resulted from debunking old knowledge and embracing the unthinkable.

For narrow purposes, human intelligence has competed with nature in shaping the future. Societies have charted their development diverging from the sound natural way, and even at loggerheads with it.

It is now being shown by the unchecked befouling of the environment and the disastrous impact of global warming that narrow plans themselves would lay the course of mankind’s self-destruct. Just allowed to take its course, nature on the other hand sustains earthly life.

Development strategies may be credited with fostering unprecedented material advancement. But they also have brought in the decimation of ecosystems and the catastrophic phenomenon called climate change.

As things stand today, the aftereffects of the pursuit of misconceived progress by societies may already have placed Homo sapiens among the species in line for extinction.

Science tells that the biosphere, without the interference of man, draws the perfect design for a world with no hunger, no devastation from calamities made worse by climate change, and no depletion of natural resources beyond recovery. This is cast in the genetic code of species.

The natural world exhibits diversity integrated in one holistic web of interrelationship and dynamic interaction, not only between living organisms, but also between them and inorganic elements, like water, soil, rocks and minerals.

Ecosystems preserve and sustain perfect balance among various elements, such as soil and water, oxygen and carbon dioxide, food and its consumption, and prey-predator populations. Resources cycle and recycle. Mass and energy flow in perfect harmony. Such is the natural design.

The way a lion, a python or an eagle ensnares a prey may be horrifying to witness.  But even as they kill, they preserve life as a whole. They plug a gap in the cycle of life, turn the food chain, obviate the degradation of the environment by limiting other species from wantonly multiplying.

Every organism from the microscopic protozoa to the mammoth whale, and every inanimate object from a tiny pebble to the biggest mountain range, take each one’s place and fulfill each one’s role in the ecological arrangement that supports and sustains life. The DNAs written into their beings set the characteristics that make everything dynamic, one and interconnected.

The fruit man eats, the tree he gets shade from, and the herb he extracts to cure ailment are all blueprinted by the chromosomes of each species. Biological genes have already drawn up how he will secure nourishment for the next ten to fifty years, breathe fresh air, prevent disasters from landslides, break the lash of winds, and regulate climate.

An incomparable intelligence has engineered with perfect synchronization of time and motion how myriads of life forms as well as non-living things shall interact with each and everyone to maintain and reproduce life down to every minute in a holistic planetary ecosystem that manages population of species, provide and distribute food through the predator-prey link, and spin the cycles of energy and matter from generation to generation.

No human ingenuity can ever set life on a journey, like a projectile of a seed coasting along the seashore, finding a right spot on the shallow waters, descending vertically, planting itself on the sandy bed, taking roots, and becoming a new mangrove tree.

Amazingly, the shape, buoyancy, growth characteristics, and even how the seed may end to give birth to a new life have already been encoded by an intelligence that of humans is nothing in comparison. The code is written in the genome of the specie.

Thus, it should not be a surprise if there is indeed a lot of brainy stuff in the supposedly thoughtless wilds. Intelligence and logic unmistakably course through the natural world. There is better order in the jungle, serving the purpose of existing forever, than in human society.

Man plans, nature disposes. He built the grandeur that was the city of Pompeii. In a fury, nature personified by Mt. Vesuvius demolished it with red hot lava and ash. Kingdoms that have once stood proud and basked in the glory of a golden age would end up a heap of ruins, like the Angkor Vat, overrun by dirt and choked by jungle growth.

Over time, nature outlives what men have lived with. Marvels of edifices succumb to the elements. Water constantly dripping on stone and roots creeping under masonry finally tear and reduce to ruble what once were grandiose structures .

With forest covers razed to almost zero by greed, towns that have stood for hundreds of years at last vanish under landslips and liquefied mud cascading from mountains and burying them under meters of earth.

Abuse nature and it will react violently. When there were no more forests to hold water, an abnormally large volume of it roared downstream and drowned 8,000 in Ormoc City, during the lash of a mild tropical cyclone named Typhoon Uring.

But people never learn, or just refuse to, obsessed with the accumulation of wealth. The only way to get out of the path of disasters that are getting worse and more tragic is to let nature take its course. But driven by greed for pointless material prosperity, they couldn’t help it.

Men plan narrowly, nature designs comprehensively. In the name of development, they spend mind-boggling amounts of money and natural resources to build settlements that calamities easily demolish, because they have swept away the barriers that could naturally protect them.

Confronted by seasonal floods and lahar flows that hit communities with tragic effects, the government resorts to building dikes costing billions of pesos that later crack and soon give way to the elements. Officials insist doing so even with the knowledge that what could better deal with the hazards are not engineering but ecological solutions.

Because of the narrow purpose of piling up treasures on earth, humans alas unwittingly make plans that in the long run work against themselves. They devise schemes to get exceedingly rich. But when they have done so, there is nothing left to live off. The natural biophysical environment has been so depleted to further support life and habitation.

With the onslaught of climate change, there may even be no more dry and solid ground to stand on. Man’s proud progress has blown in his face. What support life and really matter – air, water, solar radiation, soil to grow food, and vegetation, are cut off. When the artificial destroy the natural, it has destroyed mankind itself.

Red October Plot? It’s Good to Revisit the Past

BIMBO CABIDOG

When Ferdinand Marcos placed the country under Martial Law on September 21, 1972, were the commies, which he used as the principal reason, poised to seize power?

What Marcos did later would belie it, and make the signing of ML Proclamation 1081 nothing more than a seizure of power by himself.

Now, President Rodrigo Duterte and his cohorts in the military are raising the same communist spectre again. They are presenting the tale of a plot to oust him by the left coalescing with the Liberal Party, Magdalo, newly formed anti-tyranny alliances and even elements of the Armed Forces.

The said political formations were supposed to launch massive destabilization during the 46^th commemoration of martial law. But it did not happen. Duterte’s military cohorts quickly adjusted the ouster plot from September to the next month. They switched the script to one labeled “Red October.”

It might be good to revisit the recent past to see what Red October is really about. Here is an uncanny similarity with what Marcos did 46 years ago, and what Duterte is cooking up now.

After the declaration of martial law on the pretext of a communist takeover, Marcos reigned as a dictator for fourteen years. Contrary to his claim, his rule went unchallenged by any significant armed resistance except by the Moro Islamic movement in the south.

The peace that prevailed actually showed no imminent danger to the nation that warranted suppression of civil liberties, denial of freedom of the press and expression, abolition of Congress, and the night of repressive terror that ensued. But PP 1081 has implanted his fascist dictatorship for good.

In 1972, all the Communist Party of the Philippines and its military wing, the New People’s Army, had was a rag-tag band of rookies getting their first deadly lessons in guerrilla warfare.

With their political-military strength, for the communists to try in an instant at adventurously dismantling the ruling state machinery and putting up a new rule all over the country was quixotic. It was mission impossible, a no-no for revolutionaries who at the very least still hold their sanity.

Besides being downright stupid, such quick victory schemes were not in sync with the doctrine of protracted armed struggle by CPP founder and first chair Jose Maria Sison.  

No one was in a position to grab state power except Marcos. There was no danger of the country falling under the dictatorship of the proletariat as communism envisions. The supposed grave danger was a barber’s tale propped up by Marcos to justify the dissolution of the liberal democratic political order and installation of his own dictatorship. This was what exactly happened in his palace coup.

The hoisting of the communist bogey followed by the declaration of martial law was a ploy to: one, grab absolute power and foist one-man rule with Marcos doing whatever he wants, unhampered by any democratic checks and balances and dissent: two, perpetuate his reign beyond what was provided by the Constitution, with no more time limit.

The painting of the spectre of communism convinced the people for a while that ML was necessary. But they found out soon that they were fooled. The CPP-NPA was nowhere near any seizure of power. Decades since, the armed left has not even gotten off the strategic defensive phase: the stage of armed struggle where it still lacks the capability to mount large-scale offensives and possess territory.

After surmounting this first stage, the revolutionary movement still has to hurdle two more – the stages of stalemate or parity of force with the government, followed by the stage of counter-offensive, before it could finally establish its own “national democratic” state with a “socialist perspective.”

The succeeding second and third hurdles look into probably a century more of warfare to accomplish complete victory if such is ever achievable.

Right now, a communist capture of power is a punch at the moon. The CPP-NPA merely has gone as far as gain the reputation of waging the longest running insurgency in Asia. But parity of forces and weaponry with the government is not in sight – near or far.

So go back 46 years ago, how Marcos was blatantly lying. The fearful image he presented about communism being ready to swallow the whole country was a hoax. The movement’s challenge then consisted mainly of isolated ambuscades in thinly dispersed pockets of armed resistance, accompanied by teach-ins in campuses.

Those  who decided indeed to take up arms and go to the countryside were but a bunch of intellectuals fresh from the academe combining with remnants of the defunct Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan. The two groups reconstituted a fledgling army after the HMB’s route by the Magsaysay government.

Fourteen years later, history would take an unfortunate turn for both the Marcos dictatorship and the CPP-NPA, shortening the life span of the former, while lengthening the protracted struggle of the latter. The turn was Edsa 1 capping the anti-dictatorship ferments in February 1986.

The often-called people power revolution at Edsa ousted Marcos via a peaceful civilian-military revolt driven by the middle class, under the auspices of the traditional political opposition and rich business sponsors in Metro Manila. It also prolonged the timeframe of the left, thereby setting its protracted struggle on yet an open-ended course.

As one effect, the historical divergence shifted the attention of the people from the political front with a still festering armed conflict to the economic front. This made it harder for the CPP-NPA and its broad political arm, the National Democratic Front, to expand the ranks of the armed revolution.

Another effect was the restoration of democratic space under a new dispensation. This diverted attention of the masses from pursuing further socio-political change to settling down and taking opportunity with what the post-dictatorship arrangement has to offer.

Among other setbacks for the left is the post-1986 newly contracted indulgence in political talk and electoral Monday morning quarterbacking of the citizenry. The counterproductive and misled kind of political involvement riveted ordinary folks in all walks of life.

The post-Marcos order made the people forget that there were still so many things to do outside the electoral path to secure substantial and meaningful improvement in their lives.

The left’s target mass base for itself would be hoodwinked into engrossing in chatter over the topic of elections, which were turning out to be futile deceptive exercises as far as the interests of the basic social sectors – the peasant, workers, urban poor, youth, women and professionals, were concerned.

Certain reforms, like the enactment of the Local Government Code, would bring beneficial results hoisting a semblance of meaningful change that the masses clung to. But these shied away from the social transformation that the left purveyed.

In the 46^th annual commemoration of ML, the insurgency of the CPP-NPA-NDF continues. But it still has not progressed into the stage when it could already inflict decisive defeats on state forces and take position of territory that it could well defend.

Like before, the reds are still in no mood for insurrectionist adventure wishing to sweep the whole country in an armed conflagration. They have neither the firepower, nor formidable mass base, nor heated social condition to kindle it.

So what then is the Red October about that Duterte is mongering? By all indication, it is more of a Hollywood-like production with a badly written script than any genuine blueprint for drastic regime change.

Duterte’s loyal choir among the AFP generals are taking preposterous lengths to present the plan for the so-called Red October in paper marked with large fonts that spell SECRET. Does any plotter of a government ouster resort to such idiocy?

Nonetheless, there is a sinister plot that the citizens must fear and worry. It is a plot to foist Marcos-style fascism using once again the communist bogey. This is the installation of a regime misleadingly labelled revolutionary government, to put the country under Duterte’s absolute and unlimited rule.

The chilling past is coming back to haunt again. The Red October smacks of déjà vu.

Where is people power?

BIMBO CABIDOG

The palace says people power won’t work against Duterte. The statement is of course fallacious. People power will always work against anybody in power. The question is: will it yet happen?

People Power II cut short the term of President Joseph Estrada. The country may now be worse off than during Erap’s time. But the massive numbers of citizens that overthrew him are off the streets. 

The atrocities during Ferdinand Marcos’ fourteen years of dictatorship seem like juvenile delinquency compared to the terror, disregard of the rule of law, murderous impunity, trampling of democratic institutions and pure wickedness that grip the country today. But where are the demonstrating millions that figured in Edsa 1 and 2? What happened to people power? 

One thing is sure: the people have not gone anywhere. They are in the country, dispersed all over the length and breadth of the archipelago. And they continue to make history if of a different kind – a history of not taking collective action even as the situation worsens.

But the power to debunk the order of the day is inert. The dynamo of radical political change that has seen bad rulers in the past fell before civilian upheavals could not be harnessed, not now anyway. It sleeps in the hands of the citizenry. 

People power lies cold, although not dead. The youthful warriors who went into the chill of the night to fight with nothing but each one’s firm conviction are no more than ghosts of the past to haunt the paranoid powers-that-be. No inducement at present could whip their numbers back again. 

The concerned citizens who flocked in their hundreds of thousands into a defenseless twelve-lane highway squeezed between two major military camps, to shield mutineers from the wrath of a dictator, wouldn’t budge an inch anymore to defy another more atrocious fascist dictatorship. 

Is there no longer hope in the so-called people power yet rising? Have the citizens grown tired of it, or realized it as a big mistake? The answers to all are No!

The dynamo of social-political change is still very much available for history making. It just isn’t turning now, or it can’t be turned yet. The energy is at rest.

The tectonic political movements of Edsa 1 and 2 that toppled two rules in the country not by election but by citizens’ uprising are still being seen by majority of Filipinos as events of epic proportion elevating the country in the eyes of the world. They represent the race’s noble and heroic character.

They were certainly not a regretful blunder, but moments of glory and pride throughout the country’s long history of fighting oppression. So why are the people not going for it now in the face of unbridled tyranny? Why are there no rising in the streets?

Disabuse your mind of the thought that the Edsa experiences in 1986 and 2001 were revolutions. They were not. The people who massed up in what would evolve into full blown uprisings were not plotting to change the social or political order. They were merely responding to a call vested with life and death urgency. Their action, knowingly or unknowingly, was tactical. It was for the short-term purpose of confronting an issue.

Yes, the affairs did not fall along a strategic course, consciously charted by ideological beacons over a long period of time, to fundamentally transform society. They were a spontaneous and instant response to a situation. They passed no hatching or weeks of deliberation. They just struck on impulse.

One common thing about their implosions was their being unplanned. No conscious political force engineered, much more organized, them. They just sprang like mushroom blooms on a clear day. They sprang from a ripened revolutionary moment, unscheduled and spot on.

It is the moment of profound crisis that political thinkers talk of: the resistance or repugnance of the ruled to rule in the old way, and the failure of rule to rule in the same old way. The political dynamo that turns change is the spontaneous and instantaneous action of the people to confront a situation.

Without the presence of the said crisis, expect no people power. This is because it cannot simply be commanded, induced or enticed to rise. It has a mind of its own. It heeds a different voice than agitators or partisan leaderships would presume. In fact, it can distrust them or being led by them.

The usual banners, colors and oft-rehashed slogans may pose a sectarian barrier to it. They can discourage more than encourage people power. The people in their millions affiliate only with the genuine expression of what they think or feel, not what self-claimed revolutionary vanguards want them to think or feel.

Sometimes, interested political entities in the eagerness to rally the people under their calls actually alienate them. Why doesn’t people power spring to action now? A reason may be the alienation and distrust of the people re those calling for it.

Two determining factors have been shown to bring about people power. One is the objective condition prevailing at the given moment. This is the existence of a profound crisis of rule that makes the order no longer tenable, acceptable or livable to the ruled. It needs only a triggering incident to explode, like the foiled mutiny of a bunch of the Armed Forces' junior officers accompanied by the call of Cardinal Sin to shield them with civilian warm bodies in the glaringly dying moments of the Marcos dictatorship .

The other is the subjective state of the masses. This is the awareness and sense of profound injustice that they think as well as feel impossible to live with anymore. Such a consciousness, coupled by the conviction that action to resist the prevailing regime is right as it champions no other agenda than theirs, makes the political setup volatile.

Kindling the latter is no simple matter. In the present situation it is being doused by the people's historical experience themselves of the post-Edsa period. Edsa 1 may be credited with democratic restoration, but it did not make the majority truly rule. Alas, the people have begun to see that.

The era brought about by the removal of Marcos merely restored the power and wealth of the elite cliques that lost them to his dictatorship. The Lopezes for one regained Meralco including the electric coops that sprouted during the time the government has already taken over the utility.

The comeback of the pre-martial law order during the post-martial law period ushered the reign of political dynasties and the same old politicians using money to buy elections and thereby gain bureaucratic entitlement to the division of economic spoils compounded by the raiding of the public coffers.

The launching of people power in the long run did not put power in the people. The succeeding post-Marcos dispensation left them powerless. it excluded them from rule. It rendered them helpless against corruption and greed by the elite that frustrated their aspirations of a better life.

Conditions would worsen that it again necessitated one more political upheaval of citizens massing at Edsa to remove another despicable rule. People power II succeeded in changing regime not by the constitutional route of elections, but by the forceful removal of a sitting president through massive and paralyzing demonstrations. But again the aftermath of the saga left the people holding an empty bag. They were still powerless, excluded from rule by the elite, and condemned to suffer far worse conditions.

Social enlightenment could have hedged the people against victimization by politicians especially in elections that always turn out to be self-defeating exercises for them. But no one and nothing helped them. Even the left which has arrogated the task of educating the masses would dismally fail in raising their consciousness.

Such were the post-Edsa realities that now make them wary against being used again in people power sagas by political interests extraneous to theirs. Given the subjective state, forged by painful lessons from the past, no call for people power may yet hope to be heeded until the conditions have become ripe for themselves to call for it.

The LOSS Syndrome

BIMBO CABIDOG

Lack or scarcity can be more imagined than real. But thinking of them paralyzes. Majority of people usually don’t move even if they have to, because they think they don’t have enough to get things going.

The mental state pulls back action and stops the brain from thinking any further. Unfortunately, many if not most of the traditional leaders the masses rely upon to take action on their woes or do feats that not just anybody could do, succumb to the LOSS syndrome that is: the lack or scarcity standpoint.

Same is true with those at the helm of local governance. Mayors or local chief executives perennially complain of not having funds to implement programs or projects for development. Actually, the thinking has become a customary excuse for not being able to do something to benefit constituents. 

If there is Friday sickness among employees, there is not having the resources as favorite excuse of heads of offices for short performance. They could have already addressed festering problems. But needed wherewithal were not available, they commonly rue. 

So, sorry na lang for the served who expect more of the usual. Certain initiatives, though part of the job description, could not be done because they presumably need money to take off, but unfortunately it is limited or unavailable. 

Nothing has been done or is being done? The reason always is that government is hard-up. The agency has meager budget to carry on its host of functions. Though meritorious and warranted, projects have to wait for the availability of funds. Hang on demand or need, better luck next time. 

But there is a saying among Tagalogs: Aanhin pa ang damo kung patay na ang kabayo? (What are you still going to do with the grass, if the horse is already dead?) A solution may be the most ingenious to have been thought of. But if a problem has done its worse, can any good still happen? 

Answers are not supposed to take forever. They can’t. They must be timely. The soundness of response is not only in its correctness, but in its being delivered in real time. There is more frustration in a good deed that is useless, simply because it is too late. 

Politicians and bureaucrats in government are fond of blurting out bright plans that the people become hot and very excited about, only to douse them in the end with the cursory remark: “Sayang di natin magagawa ito dahil walang pondo!” (It’s a waste we can’t do this because there are no funds!) 

Somehow, looking at challenges from the Lack Or Scarcity Standpoint has become a habit of the mind. In most cases, LOSS is attitudinal rather than factual. It owes to two salient reasons. One is non-concern, thus, the lack of commitment. LOSS is the quick excuse for people who really don’t care.

Second is the hesitance or outright resistance to walk the extra mile, and deliver more than the average. Often, it is even the reluctance to break the norm of eschewing responsibility, trumping diligence, and carrying on below par performance. 

Non-performing assets in public service have gotten inured to doing nothing but enjoy bureaucratic entitlement. So, in the face of challenges and responsibility, they hang up hands saying: “Wala tayong magagawa!” (We can do nothing.)

The government should have more of service-driven and dedicated public servants who have none of the LOSS syndrome, rather than the opportunistic feeling-entitled pretenders who are only after power, pays and perks they don’t deserve. 

Even real inadequacy in resources can be overcome if implementors of projects can get rid of the LOSS syndrome. There is actually no scarcity of resources, only scarcity of options. Many heroic persons who care to give more than they receive have proven that. 

In dire straits, everyone has to do each one’s best to pull all collectively to calm seas. Those who do so should be creative and resourceful in hurdling perennial shortness of means. They should adopt the character of not giving up before adversity, simply because they are barehanded, but of waging struggle if from scratch, surmounting the impossible. 

For a country in hard and turbulent times, there is no place for closed minds that tell it can’t hurdle, because we are simply poor. Of course, in the complexity of a nation’s existence and rise, we are ultimately rich, not only in means but capabilities to secure them. 

The ship must reach safe and warm port or all aboard will perish. The attitude should be: we shall. The vessel should not unfortunately go down to the bottom of the sea, because of a crew that keep on saying, maybe, but, if….

Amid times of trouble, there is no time to indulge worries on what we only have or have not. Out with the psychological deficit syndrome, let’s go rolling. Let’s do it!

The Power To Dream

BIMBO CABIDOG

Sleep is the time, according to a passage in the Book of Job, when God visits us. Well, everyone seems not to notice it. 

But isn’t such a humdrum and common occurrence for every human being indeed mysterious? One thing sure, we spend half or one third of our time on earth in that other reality.

Once, sleep treated me to the sensation of a pleasantly disorienting dream. I dreamed of flying. It seemed very real I thought: wow I could fly! 

The experience exhilarated even long after I awoke, which kept me wondering: can I really fly? Yes perhaps I can, owing to some unexplored factor like the power to dream.

Well, this was how I did fly. 

After a fest of chicken in coconut milk broth for a heavy supper, there was nothing to do. I bide time in the moon-bathed veranda of my enchanted hut under coconut grooves. 

In a while, drowsiness swept over me. I snuggled on a bamboo bench and let go. The shutters to the outside world closed. I shunted into the twilight zone.

Immediately, wind flooded through me in a shaking rush. Some esoteric force lifted my body into a horizontal position off the ground, and objects sped past me, or I was actually speeding past them. 

There was an aisle of a massive structure as of a cathedral through which I sailed above the heads of people. It stunned me to discover in split of a second that I was airborne. I quivered to think so.

Into an antechamber and connecting corridor I coasted. Then I was suddenly out in vast open space. I began to climb the heights, soaring on a curve line upward. The atmosphere was thinning. I thought I was touching the sky.

At that level, where houses on the ground already looked minuscule, I accelerated. I cruised along the swirling airspace, farther and farther away from ground zero. Down below spread a stretching vista of magnificent terra firma, a wavy carpet of vegetation glimmering like a massive sea. 

In distant intervals settlements welled, where brightened blocks of houses nestled defined by streetlights. The people must be already asleep, unmindful of what's going on above them.

The scene below under the moonlit night sky bounced back a luminescent aura up to where I streaked throbbing aerodynamically to the rush of wind currents. 

Then I slipped to becoming conscious of myself in a sphere I was not supposed to be. I am human, and I have no wings to fly. I can’t do so. Is it really happening? The weight of the thought began to pull me down.

Hesitation switched to apprehension. I sensed the bright glow in my face turned to the cold ash of fear. What if the force suddenly stops? Up in the towering heights, the earth’s gravity will again assume jurisdiction over my body mass and its paperweight condition will hastily transform into a solid ball of lead hurtling back to ground level with the speed of sound. I quivered to think of it. 

Doubt pulled a quick downward tug on me. Confusion poised to storm in. I intuitively knew, once I allow it, flight would shift to falling. Kilometers up from ground zero would be done in seconds. And I would be swatted on hard ground like a mosquito on the windshield of a car speeding at 150 kilometers per hour. 

Instinct told me that I had to regain the belief in myself flying, and that I could do it forever. With the thought, confidence lifted me up again. I scrambled to try the arching sky-ways. I was now at the threshold of the great ranges of the heavens cruising on a steady course. 

I didn’t even remember that in that altitude, the air pressure could already blow me into smithereens. I lodged on the awareness of myself as itself a dimension of air in human form.

Years since the unforgettable episode, I would keep reflecting: did I dream or did I actually become another being, much like pressing the button of a remote commander and changing TV channel? 

Perhaps, answer to that in a Taoist frame of mind can lead us out of present human dilemmas. Maybe, it can show the way to a better life, and horizons of unlimited alternatives for full existence.

The path starts with the power to dream. Who knows, such may lead to the lost garden where the tree of life grows?

We Kept On Moving: My Story of Martial Law

BIMBO CABIDOG

Late afternoon of May 30, 2016 I filed the documents for my claim as victim of human rights violation during martial law, in time to beat the deadline of the Human Rights Victims Compensation Board.

The submission entered my own martial law story into the official records of the government. It was in legalese, but said something of the dark era we recall as the Marcos dictatorship. Here is my story.

As we all know, Ferdinand Marcos while serving the final term of his presidency in accordance with the Constitution signed Proclamation 1081 on September 21, 1972. The step placed the country under martial law, a wily stratagem that indefinitely extended his rule.

Marcos announced the draconian measure three days later when most of the potential opposition have been nabbed and clamped in military stockades by a lightning roundup of his security forces.

The imposition of martial law axed the old liberal democratic model of rule by which Filipino leaders organized the country in the post-1946 independence era. Marcos padlocked Congress – the legislative branch, and governed via presidential decrees. No credible elections happened thereafter.

Martial law was resorted purportedly to meet the threat of an alleged communist takeover. But later, Marcos wove the tale of weaning Philippine society from the stranglehold of the oligarchic rich that dominated the political system and held sway over society as a whole. Both pretexts were made up.

He fabulously called the palace coup a revolution of democracy from the center. Ironically, the new dispensation went into suppressing the political and democratic rights of all citizens.

The first round of arrests netted stalwarts of the opposition in the senate who only a year ago thinly survived lethal injuries from the bombing of the Liberal Party rally at Plaza Miranda. Two early occupants of the martial law cells were celebrities Senators Benigno Aquino Jr. and Jose W. Diokno.

Others by the thousands – students, teachers, writers, media practitioners, religious, unionists, and minor political figures started filling up detention centers all over the country, such as Bicutan.

Marcos sought the people’s subservience with the mantra: “Sa ikauunlad ng bayan disiplina ang kailangan.” (For the country’s progress, discipline is needed.) But more than anything else, it meant silencing critique, and locking up the free-wheeling oftentimes unwieldy Fourth Estate - the suffocating grip of the regime’s propaganda machine.

Quieting dissent and dominating the propaganda war, the dictatorship attempted to culturally and ideologically remold the nation in the fascist dictator’s image and likeness. Controlled media outlets played and replayed the virtues of the New Society with its supposed boons ad nauseam.

But no matter how the regime peddled all of the breaking events to be harbinger of a bright future, the reality could not be erased that they were turning a dark page in the country’s history. The penning of PP 1081 kicked off fourteen tortuous years of an order that unleashed state terrorism, military brutality, “conjugal kleptocracy,” and crony plunder on the people.

Personal Effect

The advent of dictatorship was a life-changing one for me. The story I filed at the HRVCB delved on my warrantless arrest barely a year since, a wrenching experience that pushed me from contained campus politics, as an official of our school’s student government, into radicalism.

The first thing martial law did to me was make me a hunted person. Army intelligence and the then Philippine Constabulary blacklisted me for being a student leader and campus figure active in political discussion circles.

I initially eluded being caught. But operatives of the MIG finally picked me up at a bus terminal with the aid of my father who prevailed on me the night before to come with him “to clear my name.” It turned out to be a surrender.

Incarceration incommunicado in an isolated “safe house” of a military intelligence unit followed arrest. Throughout the detention, only my teary-eyed mother could see me and that was once.

My prison ordeal was spiked with psychological torture. At times, the menacing barrel of a loaded M16 rifle stared at me. It would be used by my custodians to poke at my private part and wake me up in the middle of a sleep.

In her single visit, my mother touched on my studies. I was already at second semester third year in liberal arts majoring philosophy. I told her that maybe the best thing to do is to just ask the university authorities to drop me.

I had to quit college. We would only be wasting money paying for the whole semester without me attending classes. The tuition obligation had to stop.

Several months later, probably finding me harmless, the military transferred me and a co-detainee to a house of a relative of one of its agents, as First Lady Imelda Marcos inaugurated the San Juanico Bridge connecting Samar and Leyte, on her birthday.

The step became a de facto release. A week later, I would walk out of the house and took a passenger ride home with no one preventing.

Release from prison did not offer freedom. Restrictions and obligations hounded me. But being freed offered a choice of whether to perpetually give in to fear and suppression, or take resistance through other creative ways at great risk of paying one’s dear life. I chose the latter.

Four years later, truckloads of soldiers came for me, rake my house upside down, and plant evidence of subversion: a Mao book and a rusty .38 caliber pistol. Bungling on their part and auspicious circumstance let me slip out of a veritable capture.

Flustered by the incident, I decided to shift to the countryside and join the underground in mass politicization and organizing activities up to armed anti-fascist struggle.

Sacrifices Under A Fascist Rule

You may not be detained. But still, your liberty is curtailed and your rights are denied. You do not enjoy the freedoms citizens have in a genuinely free country. That is what fascist dictatorship is all about.

Free speech that is saying something negative about the dispensation landed you in jail. Independent and objective press was banned. Organizing by the citizenry was taboo. Only one organization could be formed, the Kabataang Barangay chaired by Marcos’s daughter Imee.

An off-the-cuff question could kill you, like Archimedes Trajano, a student of the Mapua Institute of Tachnology who was abducted, tortured and mangled beyond recognition before his lifeless body was dumped in the street, for asking about the qualification the dictator’s daughter to head the youth.

Under the prevailing Orwellian atmosphere, the thought of still going back to my studies no longer attracted. I realized that a human being’s true worth was not inside the four walls of the classroom insulated from the harsh realities of the outside world.

You find your exact humanity and gain your proper education in the midst of the people’s struggle against the ills that beset them. You become the whole person that you intend to be in the fight for what you believe in.

That was easier said than lived. To no longer go back to school, to cease from something I have been doing everyday since childhood and gotten accustomed as life itself, struck too hard and painful. I felt like being taken away from a habitat and losing the means to breath.

I had moments of doubts and hesitation. But the die, as Shakespeare said, has been cast. I summoned the courage to face the specter of an uncertain and perilous future.

Then again, the condition of my parents made it all the more agonizing. A college education was the strong foundation that they wanted to give me. They nursed the dream of my becoming a professional and successful person one day. I imagined their frustration and thought I may not bear it.

It broke my heart to know theirs breaking. Nonetheless, I and thousands of others in the same predicament took the sacrifice, for the nation’s sake.

It was not simply a matter of choice anymore. If I still wanted to pursue studies, the climate of repression turned me off. Fascism curtailed academic freedom and a truly meaningful education. It designed schooling not to set learners free with the truth, but to make them slaves by deception.

I could not see myself getting a college education that meant doing and parroting what the totalitarian state bid. For me, such was not the environment for intellectual growth to occur.

Before, I chalked little achievements in the academe, campus and society: debating instructors, scoring high grades, writing an article for a university mag, getting a break in one of the local radio stations, and hitting ambitious social goals for a better tomorrow. Proclamation 1081 dashed them all. There wasn’t anything anymore in those spheres to go back to.

On to the Fighting Front

I left campus-based activism for the more promising in terms of social change: guerrilla warfare. I said goodbye to the cozy comfort of the university and my neighborhood. I shirked the enticement of untroubled genial life in exchange for treading treacherous mountain trails lurking on the edge.

That probably was the least traveled road, poets talk about, the road of hard strife and dangerous living that my mother would never wish for me. But the urge to resist choking repression and get a better deal for the country got me through.

I survived a turbulent time, where I wasn’t taking cover in some secured haven. I am now a sexagenarian, among other things a living witness to the horrors, violence and injustice that Filipinos endured when the dictator Ferdinand Marcos ruled, fiercely repressive, forcefully deceptive.

No, I was not just a witness. I played a revolutionizing part. Along with countless freedom warriors, I fought against the brutalization that was not only physical but mental, that forced lies as truth.

I was once amused by a quote from a foreigner that spread like wildfire in the latter part of the dictatorship. It said: “The Philippines is a country of 48 million idiots and one son of a bitch.”

The guy was blindly wrong on the 48 million. There were candles of compelling moral sense and right thinking being lighted in that long dark night. They were of youth activists, lumad and peasant fighters, trade union organizers, cadres and urban poor community leaders pushing back the engulfing darkness.

Some would be snuffed by the murderous regime. But many others would light up again replacing the extinguished ones. The lighting continued until the brooding climate of fear, repression and violence began to melt from the flagrant burst of millions of flickering flames auguring liberation.

Like those of the other 70,000 who were subjected to warrantless arrest, incarceration, torture, forced disappearance and murder, my initial experience of martial law was of victimization. It is the state from which Imee and Bongbong Marcos, bratty scions of the dictator, tell us now to move on.

Well, I tell them: we did and kept doing so. The struggle we waged against authoritarianism with their father’s strangulation of the people’s core human liberties that culminated in February, 1986 when the dictator hurriedly flew out of the country prove that we have moved on from the initial shock of martial law. 

We kept moving on from one battle to the next throughout 14 years of iron rule. We have moved on from being mere victims of atrocity to deciders of our fate, fighters for freedom, champions of democracy, and forgers of our nation’s destiny.

The same kinetic spirit still prevails to this day in the struggle to frustrate the remnants of the dictatorship who are bent at revising history and regaining political power.

Our kind shall keep on moving, because we do not forget the past. We persist to make sure that the country has no more of it, and that the unfortunate rise of a fascist dictatorship will never happen again!