These are mainly my parents and substitute parents, teachers, community elders and such. Our ‘capitan del barrio’ in Barangay Upper Rock Quarry and Lower Lourdes then was ‘Ka Vidal’ Fonseca. He was a kind old man who spoke puritanical Tagalog and served as a deacon for the Iglesia ni Kristo, lokal ng Magsaysay Avenue.
He was all praises for President Ferdinand Marcos. Because of his moral ascendancy, others in the barangay who didn’t really have any opinion about Marcos and martial law were content enough to just copy his.
He had a son, Moises, who was my contemporary and street playmate. He and I soon learned the lyrics of the martial law theme song “Bagong Lipunan” and took pride in that we had memorized the song, and could sing it in any key, even in two-part harmony that we made up ourselves as toothy 8-year-olds.
In school, we were systematically indoctrinated to regard Marcos as a national hero--at par with Jose Rizal, Andres Bonifacio, Apolinario Mabini, Gregorio del Pilar and all the other ‘Avengers’ circa 1898.
In fact, we were taught that the Marcos gene was uniquely adapted to embody Filipino greatness: his mother Josefa Edralin was like a fairy-godmother of some kind, his father Mariano was the precursor of Obi Wan Kenobi, his brother and sister—they were all gods and goddesses in the pantheon of superheroes headquartered somewhere in Sarrat, Laoag, Ilocos Norte. And his wife Imelda—ooooh, she was like the Philippines’ answer to Cleopatra, or the counterpart of America’s Jacqueline Kennedy. We memorized all these details to get a perfect score in a daily “know the Philippines” quiz during Social Studies, which was the subject immediately preceding recess.
In short, we were literally martial law babies, spoon-fed a daily diet of Marcos greatness, force-inoculated with mega-calories of Imeldific megalomania. Winning over the hearts and minds of generations raised this way is going to take a whole lot more than just insulting them and calling them all manner of morons.
I’m always in awe and great envy of people who are just my age today who act and talk like they always knew the horror martial law was right from Day One. Either they were REALLY mature eight-year-olds, or went from Grade 2 to graduating from UP Diliman in the same year.
I had to do it the ‘hard way’--living a childhood framed in “Sa ikauunlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan” and bathed by the fake glow of the ‘golden age’ that the Philippines supposedly lived through. It was probably just out of laziness to explain, but when we asked adults what it meant to be “anti-Marcos” they simply pointed to the long-haired, smelly and unkempt marijuana-smoking hippies of the 70s and said, “THAT is what lack of discipline will make you to be if you’re stubborn and disobedient.”
The Philippine Constabulary (PC) was raiding “pot sessions” being held in houses all over the city every night and hauling these hippies in their platform shoes and bell-bottomed pants by the truckload. So we thought of being “anti-Marcos” as criminal and decadent.
Whatever ultimate truths I know about Marcos and martial law today, l had to spend the latter half of my life discovering and re-learning by myself. So all my conclusions about the true draconian character of the Marcoses, and the profound social, cultural and economic damage that was wrought upon Philippine society by martial law no one can disabuse me of, or even challenge on the grounds of “You don’t know what you’re talking about” or “You should also know the other half of the martial law story.”
No, no, no—I LIVED that “other half of the story” that you’re talking about. In fact, it’s what completes the big picture for me. The Marcoses were only able to rob this country blind BECAUSE they conditioned us blindly first to look away as they did the robbing in broad daylight.
Marcos stole 98 centavos out of every one peso—and with all those unstolen two centavos put together, he built the Philippine Heart Center, the Cultural Center of the Philippines for the rich and well-heeled elite, the Folks Arts Theater for the slipper-clad masses, the Manila International Film Center for the families of the construction workers buried underneath it who can’t afford to have a mausoleum built in their honor so the Center just had to be IT, the Manila International Airport, the National Kidney Institute so we now have ONE kidney dialysis machine for every SEVEN MILLION Filipinos, and the San Juanico Bridge that cannot take trucks with a gross vehicular weight above five tons. We celebrate these infrastructure milestones because we were conditioned to focus on those two unstolen centavos, and to forget the 98 stolen ones.
The only real Marcos legacy there is that even long after Marcos is gone, that is STILL how our present elected officials steal our money and throw us back some crumbs.
If there’s any Marcos legacy there, it’s that we now accept as totally normal our duty to venerate our congressmen and senators—whose job it is NOT to build infrastructures—for all the “public works projects” they build, funded with our own unstolen two centavos.
If there’s any Marcos legacy he left behind, it’s how we now toast to the success of political dynasties and political families, and regularly check our checklist for each political family: are all the children in office already? How about the wife? The son-in-law? Not yet? What’s wrong with these people??
I cannot “un-live” what I lived through and experienced under martial law. I cannot renounce all the little things I did, from childhood through even much of adulthood before reaching the age of reason, to unwittingly participate in the making of the environment that made martial law tolerable, even benign.
I know the truth now, as do millions of others who will honestly admit with me of knowing only much too late.
I don’t want to lambast any morons out there for not knowing any better. I was a moron like them.
No one can undo what Marcos did. Marcos did not just do an act. He planted a mentality. His ultimate strategy was inception. That mentality still drives many people today who were NOT even martial law babies. They just picked up and read Marcos' textbook on thievery from cover to cover. They even know how to condemn Marcos convincingly--at least at some point in their life of lofty principles before they served as press secretary and such other positions.
Not everybody is Marcos. Most everybody just wants to be and, in true Marcos tradition, without making the unsuspecting people make out anything.
I don't trust any of them. We cannot have a fresh start with old bread. We must go back to a national tabbularazza. I don’t want anything from the past to despoil anything in the future of my country.
That’s why I want LENI ROBREDO to be the next President.
If you believe as I do, I’m happy for you, and I hope you don’t allow anybody to steal that joy. Don’t talk to any Leni Robredo campaigner, they have a job to do and they’re busy enough. Don’t let anyone have to convince you.
Forget that you are a martial law baby. You don't have to renounce that, you don't have to do anything. You are a good person in and of yourself no matter what president you grew up with. You don't have to convince anyone that you have seen the light and repented and such other crap.
You can make the decision to vote for Leni Robredo ALL BY YOURSELF.
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