Death of a Patriot, Birth of a Nation

BIMBO CABIDOG

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

There seem to be many things to think of. But the mind just wants itself empty. Thoughts flitted like intergalactic spaceships, fast as light. As minutes fled, they couldn’t be held in the dark cell.

Which one should he capture in the fleeing moments? Confusion swirled. Panic scratched the crystal calm. Tomorrow is terrible. Who will control it? Who will gain from it?

More than a century hence, everything will be grasped from hindsight. The question of outcome will be answered by history. Death would be a birth when time has shaped a people’s fate.

Conceived in Noli Me Tangere, change would no longer be prevented by authority. The force of the KKK was going to be the midwife of a society pregnant with it.

In the meantime, hope must yet fade into the night of his solitary retreat to pen last goodbye. No power had power on this any longer. As a nation aches for birth, folly was forcing also the oppressor’s demise.

Tomorrow, one flitting life will go – a twinkle in the inky vastness of the cosmos. A patriot will fall, but a nation will rise. The throes of death will be but the pangs of birth.

The doctor had a vocation not only to heal the sick, but to excise a social tumor and reinvigorate a race. He shall knock out the colonial viruses and knock in national identity, El Filibusterismo.

Patria Adorada was in ferment. A page in its narrative was turning. The course of events was speeding towards a cataclysmic finish of the order. Surgery by revolution was at hand.

Still in the womb of the old regime, change has taken a life of its own. The provinces were heaving, morphing into something new. But how he deflected it! He thought it was not ripe.

He avoided words. Instead of nation, he used fatherland. Instead of revolution, he chose reform. Though he helped impregnate the new, though he shared in its conception, he balked at its coming.

Dr. Jose Rizal was not prepared for two things: a land turning into war, and a people turning into nationhood. He excruciated at the crossroads. He wouldn’t be involved in the making of such history.

Had he accepted the uprising and even heeded the call to sit as head of the highest council, he would have rendezvoused with a different fate. Another die would have been cast.

But he preferred instead to give in to the fate minted by the oppressors. He separated himself from his countrymen now rising in an irreversible upheaval. His end however would fuel it.

Independence was whipping up unprecedented unity all over the islands. He opted to stay in the colonial grip hoping perhaps the night will vanish of its own. It did not let him see the new day.

Yet, the doctor was a paradox. Persisting on his path of reconciliation of an already irreconcilable contradiction, he yet became a guiding light of the people decided to overthrow the old order.

The ruling class strove to extinguish the flame of his historical engagement with the sentence of death by musketry. The act would instead ignite a revolutionary conflagration throughout the archipelago.

Death, intended to douse the fires of rebellion, turned out to be a gasoline. It stoked the collective anger that spread to the regions and engulfed the archipelago in a consuming fire.

For this, the doctor would still be the most extolled countryman. The people revered him even when he renounced being part of their rebellion. He became a national hero though he refused nation.

With him at the helm, the country’s course may have been piloted to more desirable outcomes. But by not being in a position anymore to marshal it, he avoided likewise risking his place by a big mistake.

Thus, his place in the founding of the Filipino was sealed. 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 toppling them.

In life, Dr. Jose Rizal pulled his countrymen away from uprising. His death pushed it vigorously like never before. Morir es descansar. To die is to rest. Demise rested the leading light’s firm detraction.

Paradox played tricks again. The doctor did not renounce allegiance to Spain. He denounced the idea of a revolution to separate from the Spanish masters. They discredited his position.

He was not for severance, much more going to war for it. He was for reengineering the colonial order into a new ruler-ruled relationship based on fair governance, justice, and few liberties.

The colonial powers-that-be itched on the musket's trigger to prove him wrong, and the revolutionists opposed to him right. His death gave birth to a nation.

Destiny denied him the taste of independence. It is sweet to live in one’s native land, sweeter to live here free. Nevertheless, death saved him from the nation’s failures and their sad outcomes.