Reading history
“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe” — H.G. Wells.
TO Voltaire, it is “…the register of crimes and misfortunes.”
The domestic definition of “kasayayan” is unconfined to the traditional, allowing conceptions of an odyssey of events in the past (salaysay) propitiate with the presumptive value, worth, and meaning of such happenings (saysay).
Miguel de Cervantes of Don Quixote detailed history as “the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future.”
Where to position a nation in its journey with history, as it wrestles with itself, every progeny re-discovering – or an intelligentsia challenging – its past is a generational question. The answer depends on how, in a manner of speaking, “the founding torch” is inherited from the basic unit of father to son, from president to president, and how we vet and chose them, in an unending relay of maintining the undimmed – original light – of constructing the Philippine state.
The nearsighted platform of openended academic disquisition, loyalties bonded to personalities, barker intelligence, propelled by waves of emotion will not rescue our present slide when we are ambivalent to build a consensus on regarding our unchangeable and indivisible roots. The curse of re- enacting “catastrophes, crimes, and misfortunes” is inevitable when we question or detract from stable and enlightened lessons of our past. Examined from such prism, it de-legitimizes myths, messages, and policies purveyed by administrations at vulnerable and critical periods in our national life.
Example, Cory Aquino in the guise of “Edsa One” declared a revolutionary government, abolished the Batasan, ejected duly elected local officials, dismissed 70,000 civil servants, wrote a faulty 39,000 word Constitution, etc. Philippine journal instructs a President Sergio Osmeña Sr. returning (Oct 20, 1944) to a war-ravaged country doing neither of the above, most un-ambitous, except restore the interrupted 1935 Constitution and the pillars of institutional governance.
Under PNoy, President Elpidio Quirino could have lettered him on personal forgiveness and when he granted national clemency to Japanese war prisoners (1953), he said, “I should be the last one to pardon them as the Japanese killed my wife and three children and five other members of my family. I am doing this because I do not want my children and people to inherit from me the hate for peole who might yet be our friends for the permanent interests of our country.”
This 2016, the peril is in “federalism,” a reactionary proposal propelled by “provincial frustration” over national services, funding, power sharing, and mis-diagnosed peace process. A law front- loading national services into the provinces, e.g., DFA, NBI, SSS, GSIS, etc., would be simplier. Another law could amend internal revenue allotment sharing between national and provincial governments with automatic retention, at parity.
Federalism is an alien construct. Fractious in disguise. Andres Bonifacio and Antonio Luna were assassinated, the revolution made tragic by emphasized “provincialism,” when unity and unitary government is the Filipino essence next to freedom.