About those rallies at UP graduations
WHY do activists hold lightning rallies at graduation rites in UP and other schools? Aren’t they disrupting or destroying such celebrations with their displays of militancy? Why deny those who just wish to have a beautiful family celebration?
First, the lightning rallies are the national democrats’ tribute to the graduates, especially those who unselfishly offered their brilliance to many causes and who have decided to commit themselves to serving our people, wherever they may be. Indeed: Hindi sayang ang tax ng taumbayan!
Second, the lightning rallies are political theater. The protest tears down the sophisticated deception that graduates and their families see onstage. It is a last-ditch effort to remind who are the real heroes, benefactors, and rightful beneficiaries of the grateful graduate.
Usually, the keynote speaker is a representative of the rotten ruling classes whose idea of education is to treat it as a privilege, advocate tuition fee increases, deprive adequate state funding for state schools, and impose patently imperialist and elitist programs on our people
Example: Benjamin Diokno, awarded by UP with an honorary degree for foisting economic policies good only for imperialists and the elites. He belongs to the bloc of cabinet members who reject free tuition and, if they can’t stop it, would turn it into a scam called “socialized” tuition.
At other times, the keynote speaker originates from the lower class, but have morphed into something else. Like a traditional politician, a big businessman or maybe a technocrat whose views represent a 180-degree turn from his origins. Often, the speaker would preach about how to overcome limitations and social inequities through sheer “hard work,” luck, and prayer.
Thirdly, the placards and streamers remind the graduate of how the UP administration and the state worked to make their graduation needlessly difficult: the shortage of dorm rooms and other facilities, the refusal to rebuild the Faculty Center, the rise in miscellaneous fees, the no-late- payment policy, the no payment-no exam policy, the destruction of the General Education curriculum, and the complicity of the university in many festering issues.
That in the four, five, eight, or more years of being UP students, the ideal of “honor and excellence” actually materialized in similar protests, in acts of defiance and in subverting what the UP administration and the state would want to do or would refuse to do.
Fourth, the protests are the activists’ send-off for the graduates.
National democrats invite them to “work” in trade unions, learn from peasant communities, teach in schools for the Lumad and other national minorities, formulate plans for industrialization, help solve the mass transport crisis, provide legal aid to the oppressed, develop bills for partylist members of Congress, and join the staff of progressive cabinet members.
In other words, live up to the meaning of Oblation: Pahinungod, selfless service to the nation.
I’m not saying UP graduates cannot think freely and arrive independently at the thought of graduating with service to the nation as the ultimate concern. Of course, they can. But that’s not what graduations in UP and elsewhere are about. That is not the theme, content, and official motive of the ceremonies.
Graduation ceremonies airbrush the social role of the people’s scholar, the social context, and the public service nature of UP. UP exhorts graduates to be part of and to support the system. If they don’t hold the rallies, the activists would leave the event for the exclusive broadcast of messages of selfishness, self-centeredness, dogeat-dog, you’re-on-your-own, and “pakain ka na sa sistema ngayon na.”
Many UP graduates already have post-graduation plans: a well-deserved vacation, applying for jobs, studying again, going abroad to migrate, working the family business, starting in a job that has waited for them even ahead of graduation. The most UP could tell them is to make public service “an option,” and it usually means being a serf or servant to a corrupt bureaucrat capitalist or to aspire to be one.
Within a few years from graduation, “adulting” sets in. Wittingly or unwittingly, it has become the term for “fitting in” in the system the UP graduates once aspired to challenge and replace: accepting and defending the right and duty to buy a house (and lambasting demands for more UP dorms or mass housing), buy a car (and rejecting demands for public mass transport), pay bills (unquestioningly, for oligarch-dominated services), shop at either “artisanal” or “posh” shops (while advocating the closure and sale of public markets), and so on. In short, the system has its ways of subtly coopting the people’s scholars, and making it look “natural.” And they turn into attack dogs against activists and others who a progressive vision of education, politics, economics and other fields.
As always, the marquee streamer at these occasions contain a mere three words. No, they’re not “we love you.”
Taken together, the three words deliver a profound message that could have lasting impact when graduates either heed or forget them. They summarize the worldview behind each picket, rally, barricade, boycott, occupation, sit-in, uprising, and the entire revolution. They articulate the mindset which could realize the progressive vision most graduates share: a country that’s more fair, more equal, with compassion for the poor, prosperous because it shares the wealth created by the people, modern and innovative, conscious of history, and forwardlooking.
Emblazoned in blood-red cloth, the three words seem handed down through generations by the original activists we now call heroes. They tell of a tribute, a reminder, an invitation, and a challenge to the “iskolar ng bayan.”
Serve the people!