Monday, September 20, 2004

11:32 PM | Sabi ng student ko, "Who's Marshall? And why does he have a law?"

It's September 21 pala tomorrow. Manuel L. Quezon III writes about Martial Law in the Philippine Daily Inquirer:

Martial law was a great divide; even today, it separates all that came before, from all that has come since. Our history before 1972, when you think of it, represents the profound influence ideas and intellectuals can impact on a nation. The history of the Philippines since martial law has been marked by the steady bankruptcy of ideas and those who propagate them in our society.



The ideas -- and ideals -- of the propaganda movement; the motives and motivations of the revolution; the adaptation of the heritage of both in our attempt to reclaim our independence; the great thoughts that tried to give meaning and relevance to independence once reestablished in 1946: our country's story has been the story of thoughts, of ideas that moved the sectors that constitute our nation.



But after 1972, ideas and the intellectuals and ideologues who make them have increasingly been sidelined in the story of our national life: not least because so many intellectuals sold out or were deluded into supporting the dictatorship. The dictatorship, too, in wrecking the economy and turning us into a nation of overseas workers, virtually liquidated our middle class as a moving force of national development, and guaranteed that fewer and fewer Filipinos would have the capacity to be inspired, much less motivated, by ideas. Even people power, as we have seen in the 21 years since Ninoy Aquino's assassination, has never been fully formed, made truly workable, as a motivational idea. We have tried to make people power part of our lives, but its principles are so vague, its applications so unclear that we have gotten to be unsure if it was ever a real thought at all. People power was-is-perhaps, more of an emotion than a genuine idea.

The complete article is here.

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

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