Some things are hard to forget
NO ONE can be happy with a load up his/her shoulders for years. An emotional or psychological baggage being carried inside one’s unconscious can lead to many unwanted outcomes such as illnesses and stresses that make life less meaningful.
Some people tend to judge emotionally disturbed persons who might be struggling to free themselves from the hurt and pain of the past.
But sometimes, it’s not easy to let go of the negativities, as it pesters the present, rearing its ugly face every now and then even as the person might have wanted to get rid of them.
Lately, a dear friend just let out the sad experiences she had during Martial Law, when, as a young student activist, she was incarcerated in a military detention camp and made to undergo the harshest treatment including torture in the hands of her captors.
“Rowena”(not her real name) was telling her story for the first time to a group of young people who intently l i st en ed .
She said, she had kept it for years until one day, she just realized she needed to make known how the despotic regime of Ferdinand Marcos almost drove her to insanity when she was young and defiant.
She remembered how she was stripped naked by her captors, all military intelligence men who forced information out of her.
She also related how she was placed in a “bartolina” (an enclosed room with only a small hole on one side that barely let in light into the dark) and was continuously threatened to be killed each time a military peeps in.
To keep her sanity, she recalled having to talk to the insects in the cell, and talking to the mosquitoes, for instance, made her feel a little bet t er.
She said she endured her torment for weeks on end until she almost lost track of the days in her cell.
Forgiveness. She was almost convinced that she had already forgiven the people who inflicted physical, psychological and spiritual pain on her until three decades passed and she was suddenly confronted with a discomfiting memory.
Without a warning, she related that her bodily involuntarily responded to the stimuli as she suddenly bled profusely even if it was not yet due for her to have her menstruation.
She could not remember having experienced any pain at all, but she said the sight of her blood oozing out into her jeans was too much for her.
Many people, especially those whose memory of those dreadful years under Martial Law would say “forgive and forget” without even considering that after the so-called EDSA Revolution, nothing changed.
The country’s situation has remained the same under the grip of what progressives call the imperialists, bureaucrat capitalists, all these may seem plain jargons of yester years, but it is high time that we understand the correctness of these terms in describing the promoters of social ills in our times.
In layman’s terms, all the old social systems that fuelled the abuse of power by the ruling elites continue to persist, notwithstanding the continuing calls for genuine social change from the basic sectors that bear the brunt of wanton disregard by those at the helm of power.
The plunderers in government continue to ravage and bleed the national coffers, holding on to power with all their might, even as Filipinos fought against the tentacles of injustices, spawning unrest.
Church leaders pretend they see no evil while they too share the loot that politicians feed them to blind them from the images of hunger ever yw her e.
In Jesus’time and today’s current situation, it is still the same decadent systems that persists.