Cancelling Abad Santos

MAY 7 is a special non-working holiday in the Pampanga and Angeles City in commemoration of the martyrdom of the Kapampangan hero and former Chief Justice Jose Abad Santos.

In the long bygone days of the boomers, the day was celebrated with 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.” So honored was Abad Santos then that his martyrdom was even parallelled with Jose Rizal’s as greatest epochs in Philippine history, the Spanish Colonization for the latter, the Japanese Occupation for the former.

That was then, a long dead past.

For the past decades now, the remembrance of Abad Santos, much less memorializing his heroism, has not gone beyond the perfunctory wreath-laying and rhetoric on his official death date at the foot of his monuments – only four very visible in the whole of Pampanga: at the Provincial Capitol grounds, at Heroes Hall in the City of San Fernando, fronting the Museo ning Angeles, and of late, at the northbound entry of the North Luzon Expressway in San Fernando. 

So what school, public or private, elementary or secondary, vocational or college, in San Fernando, in the whole Pampanga for that matter, has been named in honor of Abad Santos? 

Ah yes, there was but one: Jose Abad Santos High School in 1966 per act of Congress via a measure sponsored by 1^st District Rep. Juanita L. Nepomuceno at the time when the province had only two congressional districts. Which in 1991 reverted to its old Pampanga High School, courtesy of 3^rd District Rep. Oscar S. Rodriguez, a PHS alumnus.     

Why, at the very demolition of the Abad Santos ancestral home just off the old public market in the late 1980s (early 1990s?), not even a whispered whimper of a protest was heard from the town officials or from local heritage advocates, despite the site proudly sporting the marker of the National Historical Institute as the birthplace of the hero.

Why, but for an afterthought of civic and business groups was the Gapan-San Fernando-Olongapo Road was also named Jose Abad Santos Avenue, albeit limited in usage to the San Fernando stretch, and the Department of Public Works and Highways still referencing to it in its maintenance contracts as GSO. 

Why, even the P1,000 bill that bore his image, along with fellow WWII martyrs Vicente Lim, and Josefa Llanes Escoda, have been replaced by the new “plastic” P1,000 bill featuring the endangered Philippine eagle.

Alas, to the dustbin of history has Abad Santos, along with most of our heroes, been veritably consigned. Unhappy is the land without heroes, so ‘tis cliched. But damned is that that willfully forgets them – being part of the lessons of history that Santayana admonished about.