Off heroes day

NATIONAL HEROES Day is dedicated to men and women, known or unknown, who sacrificed their lives for Philippine freedom.

A national holiday, the day has become – rather than an event to remember our heroes – one more delightful excuse for malling, vacationing, and just loafing.

Most pronounced this year as it fell on a Monday, hence an automatic long weekend. Or have you not noticed the traffic gridlock going to Baguio, the overcrowding of malls, the extra vibrancy in party places?   

On the contrary, the quietude at the heroes’ monuments, save for the perfunctory wreath-laying rites.

Save your tears ye who hold this day sacred, the very law governing the current celebration of National Heroes Day – RA 9492, signed by Pres. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo on July 24, 2007 – was crafted precisely to hew to her so-called “holiday economics,” making most holidays “movable” to Mondays and thus, long weekends for vacation breaks, malling, and other economic generating activities.  Thereby putting premium on commercial profit from the non-working day over the nationalistic, if sentimental, remembrance of all who consecrated their lives that this nation shall not perish.

Aye, the day of, indeed, for heroes turned by the stroke of a pen to the day off heroes.

It is then left to us hero-worshipping sentimentalists to do our own private remembering, and weep.

In my long-gone days of youth, Jose Abad Santos shared equal space with Andres Bonifacio, Jose Rizal, and Macario Sacay in my pantheon of heroes.

Those endless school plays of the last hours of Abad Santos highlighted by his admonition to his son Pepito to “show these people that you are brave…that not everyone is given the opportunity to die for his country” fixated in my thought processes the parallel lives of Bonifacio-Rizal, Sacay, and Abad Santos.

Martyrs all at the major epochs of our history as a people: the Spanish Colonization for the first, the American Period for the second, the Japanese Occupation for the third. Joined in later by Ninoy Aquino and Evelio Javier during the home-grown dictatorship.

In my teens, at the onset of my conscientization of socio-economic and political issues, Jose Abad Santos was relegated to lesser lights in my own hierarchy of heroes, in favour of another Abad Santos, his sibling Don Pedro.

Born to the landed gentry, Don Pedro became a traitor to his class when he embraced socialism and devoted his whole life to the propagation of the cause. I saw in Don Perico a conversion, albeit secular, akin to that of Francis of Assisi, on the spriritual plane. The son of a rich merchant named Pietro di Bernardone, the monk called Brother Sun renounced his father’s wealth and turned to a lifetime of prayer and devoted service to the poor.

Through the years, my list of heroes grew longer: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Angelo Roncalli, also known as Pope John XXIII; Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Zedong; Che Guevara, all alone; Yassir Arafat as well as David Ben-Gurion; Emiliano Zapata, whom I tend to believe, not without conceit, was my great, great grandpa; Chino Roces, and Lorenzo Tanada.

Heroic ground

Varied as they are, there is a common ground for my heroes, for all heroes, for that matter. The essence of heroism draws from both the Messianic and Mosaic elements found manifest among revolutionaries and liberators, as well as among those who set the order of things through laws, norms or standards of human conduct.

The sum of a hero’s life impacts on the times and the world beyond his own. Thus, the collective epitaph for heroes: “He left this world a better place than when he came in.” Better yet: “Now, he belongs to the ages,” as said of Abraham Lincoln by his Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. As indeed, heroes belong to all ages. Revisionists, be damned.

Comes to the mind the question: Are heroes born or made? Better phrased yet: Do heroes create circumstances, or do circumstances create heroes?

The latter has traditionally been the preferred position buttressed by historical epochs.
Without the American Revolution would there be a Washington? Without the Civil War, a Lincoln? Could Turkey’s Ataturk have arisen without the Ottoman persecution? Or Lenin sans the Romanov’s enslavement of Russia? And for that matter, Ninoy without the Marcos dictatorship?

If memory serves right, I think it was Arnold Toynbee that provided the synthesis to hero-born versus hero-made contradiction, to quote liberally (from faded memory): “When he has in him to give, and the situation demands of him to give, he has no other recourse but to give.”
Aye, even if one possesses all elements of heroism in him – generally thought of as intelligence, honor and integrity, courage, selflessness and commitment to a cause, self-sacrifice and love for others – absent a situation that will warrant the extraction and expression of these elements – a triggering mechanism of sort – the hero will not come out of him.
Akin here the lamentation in Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard: “…Full many a gem of purest ray serene, The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear. Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air…”

The essence of heroism inheres in the person and is drawn out of him by the circumstance. Both born and made is the hero then.
Bonifacio-Rizal. Sacay. Abad Santos. They all had in them to give. Placed in the situation, they gave it all. So, we remember them. Bonifacio-Rizal with shrines, countless monuments, educational institutions, even a match brand and a bank for the latter, movies and books, streets, barrios, towns, even a province, again for the latter. Ninoy too.

About Sacay? One forgotten movie. About Abad Santos? A few schools and streets, and the P1,000 bill shared with two others.

Oh yes, I remember. The Abad Santos ancestral home in San Fernando designated as a shrine by the National Historical Institute had long been torn down. With nothing to even suggest it ever existed. Its NHI marker perhaps sold to the nearest junk shop. What sacrilege!

If that is our way of remembering our heroes, then, indeed, we are a nation accursed. Is it not said – and said so truthfully – that a nation that does not honor its heroes is doomed? Again, Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

What future lies for us if we have opted not only to forget but even to disgrace our heroic past?

Most despicably disgracefully so, as in interring the remains of the dictator at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.