A descent of the Filipino spirit

President Duterte has taken a very bold step in allowing the interment of the late President Ferdinand Marcos at the Libingan ng Mga Bayani. No president in the past has had the courage to confront this issue because of what the nation has gone through during the Marcos era. The President has already received a lot of flak but I don’t think he cares. What he sees is that in time when Marcos has been laid to rest, the issue will die down and our country will heal burying the dark past forever.

But this dark past is part of our history and as a nation we must keep to heart all the lessons we’ve learned over time in order to strengthen the future. The generation today is probably baffled and demoralized with what the President has stirred upon us. But I guess, in order for him to reach his goals as a leader and for the country, we will be expecting more pains. I trust that the road he is taking us to will bring us to a better place and not to perdition.

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We need to re-define ourselves as Filipinos. It is the law that defines us. Our country needs immediate action in creating a ‘code’ committee to revise and recodify substantive laws to make our laws conform with the customs, traditions and idiosyncracies of the Filipino people. Such an endeavor will constitute for us an object of national dignification and shall reaffirm our national unity. Whereas today we are largely governed by laws primarily enacted for other people or taken almost bodily from the statutes of other countries, we shall have the proud satisfaction of working out our own laws, considering our peculiar needs and problems, our customs and character as a people, our enlightened sense of right and justice, thus achieving ‘jurisitic’ independence.

After the Supreme Court has spoken, it seems the issues surrounding the order of President Duterte to allow the interment of the late President Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani is far from being over. As a matter of fact, the decision finding no taint of grave abuse in the exercise of the President’s discretion did nothing to settle the dust, so to speak, for it only stirred more issues and opened up the repressed emotions of those who suffered under the Marcos rule, instead of promoting national healing and forgiveness. They insist that Marcos is not a hero, thus he could not be buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani, and to do so is not only an insult to the Filipino but a rewriting of history.

What did we expect, as a nation and as a people, from the Supreme Court? To declare that Marcos is not a Bayani? Alas, the word supreme is a misnomer for the parameters upon which the Court should and could decide is defined by law. It is not the Supreme Court, but the law, which is supreme. Some people already branded the 9 justices who voted to allow the burial as traitors and the 5 justices who voted against as heroes. But to the Marcoses and their supporters, the 9 justices are heroes and the 5 are villains. This is precisely the point here – a villain to one is a hero to the opposing side. The Ginebra players are heroes of the barangay but villains to the haters. As one justice commented, Marcos is without doubt a hero to the Ilocanos. Even President Digong is certainly not a hero to all Filipinos. Without a law defining who should be a Bayani, the only Bayani entitled to recognition by all is Mr. Bayani Agbayani.

Indeed, the issue is a political one that is not a justiciable controversy for the Supreme Court to untangle. According to the high tribunal, “the purpose of the LNMB, both from legal and historical perspectives, has neither been to confer to the people buried there the title of hero nor to require that only those interred therein should be treated as a hero.” In the absence of any prohibition in the law, it is indeed unconstitutional for the court to read into the law what is simply not there. This would be tantamount to judicial legislation, which is prohibited. If only the past administrations exercised that political discretion by enacting a law that would have disqualified Marcos from interment at the LNMB, the decision of the Supreme Court would have been 14-0 against the burial of the late dictator.

On this decision made by the President, I am swallowing my pride. I am actually in deep sorrow. My own family has been harassed during the Marcos regime. Other families have vanished and have not been found to this day. Many businesses have been closed down. People have been tortured and killed. And our President says all allegations against the Marcoses still need to be proven. How else could he prove the ‘documented’ horror that martial law did to this nation with the late dictator at the helm of it all? Sanamagan!

At the end of the day, I feel for the Marcos family. But I admire their guts in putting up a brave front before millions of Filipinos and billions of people around the world who despise them. A family asking for a ‘state burial’ or a ‘soldier’s burial (as they insist to call it) for their dead but without remorse or any apology for what he has done makes the spirit of man all the more restless and perturbed.

If I were in Imelda’s shoes (or her children), I would thank Digong and just bury the remains of their loved one with dignity in Sarrat, Ilocos Norte, his hometown. Not all presidents are buried at the Libingan. You have a choice. The nation is divided about the burial. Do you really feel good to go on? Fulfilled? Happy? Remember you cannot change history. You can try to but the story will forever remain in the hearts of men past down from generation to generation. What’s done cannot be undone. The pains and sorrows still exist.

“It is easier, I have always believed, to become a Saint than a Hero. “Sainthood” is decreed by the creaky, cumbersome, and slow-moving bureaucracy of the Vatican. Not so with heroes. Those who hounded them, hated them, crossed swords with them, or simply observed their sins and their shortcomings, are still very much alive when the question of their heroism or villainy comes to judgment.” Max Soliven