With Cory Aquino's passing, the Filipino people once more are united under one sentiment - loss. She has been so many things to different people - a mother, a friend, a fighter for the oppressed and a woman of faith. The political context which produced the icon Cory Aquino is the not just responsible for inculcating in our national consciousness the need to grasp the interrelationship of responsible politics and moral accountability in the way we interrogate our understandings of social involvement and Filipino identity.
I first heard of the death of Ninoy Aquino as a child from my mother who told me Ninoy was a man of principle, one who is unafraid to stand for what is right even if it has to jeopardize his own personal comfort. Growing up I learned of the other players in that story - the Marcoses, Enrile, Ramos and Cardinal Sin. To me as a child, politics sounded more like an adult quarrel but as time went by my education in politics was birthed and nourished by curiosity for things larger than me. School added a lot more in this quest for understanding meaning, social consciousness and identity formation. My own heroes were forged for me by my teachers, by the media and by my own grasp of the events of EDSA Revolution.
Although she was interpreted for me by the media, Cory Aquino isn't hard to understand because she spoke the language common to many people - the need for freedom and meaning . As such she aligned with the heroes in my childhood - Jose Rizal, Lapu-lapu, Andres Bonifacio, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington. What made her more alive was the fact that she was very much alive and accessible through the events of the day. Understanding her role today for many fo us and acknowledging her contribution to Philippine democracy will be short-sighted if we fail to continue in our current mandate to be watchers of our own freedom. We have to be very much aware of the need to guard freedom and consider it a precious gift, one thta can be abused and one that can be easily ignored.
As an educator I often think about the inevitable and intricate inflection of politics in the discipline I teach. That along the appreciation of literary texts there is an unspoken obligation to teach students the responsibility of carefully planning out one's politics, one's philosophy and one's nationalistic sentiments. Although I still try to find actual and specific expressions of this responsibility, I find it rather unsurprising to see that some students will never get the value of history and the role it plays in contemporary sensibility. The young people of today rarely speak of politics because it's contentious and uncomfortably partisan. Their vocabularies are full of myopic humor and shallow rants, mostly focused on personal discomfort and abused rights. It's about the good things about life and rarely about causes or overarching world-views. I guess this is a failure on part of the teachers who fail to educate the young on the necessity of politics, convictions and active social transformation. Many if not most teachers in many schools have abandoned that call towards educating the young about the involvement of the personal and the national.
Cory stood for freedom and Filipinos ought to be grateful for the sacrifices she made because she loved this nation dearly. Many loved only their pockets and their own personal comfort. The Filipino despite his poverty continues to celebrate this although after all the furor and fatigue, he will go back and confront the empty table at dinner.
No comments:
Post a Comment