Losing Freedom

by Raymund L. Fernandez

Kinutil, CDN / 21 September 2014

He remembers this day exactly. In 1972, it began as any other. He was a young teenager at Leon Kilat street, near Lane Theater, buying parts to repair his Jeep when a jeepney made the rounds of the downtown area, a public address system on its roof. It blared over and over again the voice of Francisco "Kit" Tatad reading the full text of Ferdinand Marcos' proclamation 1081 declaring martial law all over the country.

"NOW, THEREFORE, I, FERDINAND E. MARCOS, President of the Philippines, by virtue of the powers vested upon me by Article VII, Section 10, Paragraph (2) of the Constitution, do hereby place the entire Philippines as defined in Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution under martial law and, in my capacity as their commander-in-chief, do hereby command the armed forces of the Philippines, to maintain law and order throughout the Philippines, prevent or suppress all forms of lawless violence as well as any act of insurrection or rebellion and to enforce obedience to all the laws and decrees, orders and regulations promulgated by me personally or upon my direction…."

The words were read rather mechanically. No clue there, that all over the country, Marcos' perceived enemies were being rounded up or invited into government internment facilities. He would not know of these until weeks later when rumors began filtering in. The papers printed only news the regime wanted the public to hear. 

But on this first day of martial law, his initial reaction to the declaration was the typical  Cebuano's complete obliviousness to Manila, the national capital. Cebu, in Marcos' time, was beyond the edge of the margins. It was opposition country. And so the typical Cebuano hardly took anything political too seriously. Manila was far away. Its "natives" were generally oblivious of them. For Cebuanos, the feeling was completely mutual. They presumed life would go on as it always did. And so it did at first.

Indeed, it seemed almost to get better. If by better, one means, the garbage would finally be collected with greater regularity, so to speak. There was less criminality in the streets. A curfew was declared. For most parents of young teenage kids, this must have been all for the better. Which must have been why most people supported martial law initially. Or if they opposed it then they did so silently.

Silence is, of course, all that is needed for certain profound myths to grow and acquire a life of their own. All the more easy for them to become monumental lasting decades thereafter. The main myth was that all we really needed to do was behave ourselves and then the country would get better. "Sa ikauunlad ng bayan disciplina ang kailangan." Leave everything to the Marcoses and their henchmen.

But as all myths go, the truth lies always in the blank spaces, the things hidden from sight, or left unsaid. They haunt the innermost corridors of what people believe in, especially where they believe because it serves them well to believe. The more astute among them might later recall an old tale they read in the grade school, something about the emperor's new clothes. Everyone praised the emperor for the grandness of his new robe even if they plainly saw how the emperor was naked in front of them. And still, they cheered him on. In the end, they would all see how you can keep up an obvious pretense for years on end, for over a decade, even.

There would be other lessons to learn from all these, how cheap freedom is for those who do not need it for themselves, choosing rather to go about their lives just looking after their own personal betterment. People are so easily bought and most of the time for nothing more than what they should have gotten anyway in the natural course of things. 

The loss of freedom divides. Some lost their freedom. They languished in jail, or hid in the underground networks, or were tortured and killed away from the public view. And yet, there were also others who gained more than they lost. It would be fun to remember those years by way of an economic audit of people's fortunes. How much was actually gained and by whom? But in the end, we would only find out how life is, for some, only a throw of the dice, a seasonal turning of the fates. All the more so, when we use mere fortune as the measure of how much a person is worth.

Freedom is an odd thing. Unless a person loves it, he or she would not know what it really is; and so by that knowing could actually mourn its loss. For others, this day was and will always be, just business as usual.

###