Home Stretch

by Manuel L. Quezon III

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back constantly into the past. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Bagong Lipunan is back. Or at least, it's symbol, that bastardized version of our national flag, resurrected by the government as part of the logo for its pro-E-Vat posters. This is one of those things that remind me of the lyrics of a song they say Manilans sang, as the Japanese approached the gate of the capital: "Habang sila'y sumusulong, Tayo nama'y umuurong..."

I get this feeling not only from seeing things like the recycled Bagong Lipunan symbol, but in other acts of the government, as well. Even as the propaganda arm of the government, the Philippine Information Agency, cranks out advertisements meant to provide lift to that ponderous gasbag called Philippines 2000, it manages to slip in little schemes that seem to be part of an effort to bring us back to the past. First we became The Fiesta Islands , then Islands Philippines , complete with caribbean-inspired theme songs, and you wonder how much longer before we become officially known as The Philippine Islands, the name for our country which the fathers of the 1935 Constitution so firmly rejected! Our future, it seems, hinges on a return to a grass-skirted past that even people at the time were impatient with; and you wonder why we deserve this form of a national second childhood.

It is strange to think that a nation supposedly on a rocket trajectory to industrialization, relies so heavily on recycled emblems, themes, and even titles. Surely in our capacity as a country that provides Disney and other companies with the artistic talent they need to exploit, we can scrounge up a brilliant citizen or two to whom we can say, "there must be another way to represent the Filipino flag -find it." But then again, an attempt to just that might have led to the resurrection of a tired theme, Let's change the flag! which is usually followed by it's perennial sequel, Let's change the name of our country!

I suppose our penchant for "reconditioning" symbols may simply be a reflection of our tendency to junk symbols and images faster than propagandists can think them up; look at any government department and you will find this out to be the case. Our Central Bank alone, in its (when you think of it in terms of the life of a country) brief existence, has gone through three seals: 1949, the Imelda "modernization," and a totally new emblem, circa 1992. Anything officials can get their hands on are periodically renamed, a small sin when it comes to insignificant bureaucratic units, but which becomes civic torture in the case of streets. This madness endemic among our leaders, one is tempted to add, by way of a final parenthetical remark, is naturally explainable, too: out of sight, out of mind, the cliche goes, and no behavior is more cliched than that of our leaders, who would forget anything anyone did previously if not given the chance to indulge in a little renovating themselves.

And so we are left with conflicting images of ourselves. Of our feeble attempts to leave our mark for future generations to see, while we ourselves make mighty efforts to obscure all traces of the past, in our mad rush to reach the future. We raise a chapel and a colossus of Our Lady to commemorate Edsa, and then fence her in with imposing infrastructure, reducing this national pat on the back to ourselves to a sooty, forlorn figure scrubbed clean only in February.

We race on, and, tied to nothing, we become attached to nothing. The more sentimental among us may cling to their scraps of paper and the other flotsam and jetsam of our third world lives, but these all reflect personal attachments. Things too humble and shy to be linked with big ideas like liberty and democracy or even a sense of past accomplishments.

Witness the important anniversaries that our facing us. Ten Years since Edsa. Fifty years of Independence from the Americans. A Hundred Years since Rizal's death and the start of our Revolution. The anniversary Edsa will be commemorated by a people either too exhausted (from having to eke out a living) to be able to summon up the enthusiasm and teary emotions past anniversaries used to convey, or too apprehensive over the direction our government seems to be taking to dance in the streets, when a lot of rest for more marching to come, on the streets made famous during the anti-Marcos efforts. The anniversary of independence will be overlooked alltogether, as the entire post-revolutionary independence effort it does not fit in conveniently in with the dogma of many historians. We can look forward to lively debate over the importance of 1896, at least. One out of three ain't bad.

This should be our Year of Years, but it has already entered it's home stretch. July and August aren't far away, and February 25 is already upon us; but hardly anyone cares. How much longer before our leaden hearts quicken to those words which unite us with generations of patriotic Filipinos, starting with one that mourned a defeated Revolution, a suppressed freedom, and yearned for independence from others, and even ourselves: Ibon ng may layang lumipad...

How much longer before it's too late, and we lose all links to those who cared .

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