Our ‘secondhand’ martial law
Metrocom police patrol the streets, scouring every dark alley and street corner for violators of the national curfew. Loud knocks on your gate at two-in-the-morning could mean you’ve been targeted for arrest, persecution, or worse… “disappearance.”
Behind closed doors, radicals the Marcos regime. I’ve seen and gather in dimly- lit rooms, muted talked to peers of mine who think voices discussing the struggle against that the time of Martial Law (and tyranny. Television networks and I’m directly quoting here) “was not newspaper offices are barricaded, the that bad.” Bordering on blasphemy, airwaves and print media censored. these individuals rattle about the Journalists fear for their lives, the “peace and order” of the ‘70s, about outspoken receive death threats, the stable value of the peso, how the activists disappear into the night. dictatorship was instrumental to the
creeping progress we now enjoy. The very little this generation They air similar views on Our Version of Events knows about the EDSA Revolution Facebook, sharing the long list of and Martial Law, they got from the supposed infrastructure projects footnote in Philippine History class completed under Marcos, fawning they slept through in high school, or over the glamour of Imelda and how the gossip they’ve overheard from she influenced dignitaries the world adults who lived through that time, over, christening a time of oppression or the white lies they’ve seen shared as a “Golden Age of the Philippines.” on social media. And with the countless Pro-
Our generation has had to rely on Marcos and whitewashed Martial secondhand accounts to imagine our Law lies circulating around the own images of Martial Law. That’s internet, the misled crowd grows, why our version of events may not wandering further away from reality. always be the most reliable. Millennials know about the 12
It’s astonishing just how unaware o’clock curfews, Imelda’s lavish most Millennials are of the ills of collection of shoes, and Marcos’ iron
Swept under the rug are the Filipinos tortured and martyred, the trampling of freedom, the large- scale corruption, the thousands of who have yet to surface to this day. desaparecidos The first line of Carlos P. Romulo’s Inheritors of the Past most memorized piece, probably still ringing in the ears of most of the Filipino youth obligated to recite it, goes – “I am a Filipino - inheritor of a glorious past, hostage to the uncertain future.”
What the line falls short of capturing is that we’ve also had to heirs to the darker facets of our history. But “hostage to the uncertain future” sums up our situation spot on. The secondhand stories of Martial law atrocities, the worn promises of a