Sept 21 : Martial Law & Memory Truth Telling

How does one tell the story of a decade and a half of martial law to the young generation today?
 The proclamation of martial law happened on Sept 21, 1972. 
When it happened, the general population did not know how to react to the proclamation.

 The analysis of sociologist Randy David was that: 
(a) the ordinary person did not have civil and political consciousness and that
(b) there was widespread poverty and everyone was willing to give a chance to an unknown kind of authoritarianism that had legal justification in the 1935 constitution ( paraphrasing mine).

That brand of authoritarianism just fell into place and into the hearts and minds of Filipinos so used to patronage politics – until the promised abundance of the so-called New Society that was supposed to be rid of corruption did not happen at all. 

Up to now, I am still amazed at how the Filipino took too long to oust a dictator who ruled for over two decades.
Or for that matter, how our judiciary, at that time, said that it cannot rule against a presidential prerogative as it was a domain that involves a political question or one that belongs to the realm of the sovereign people, as the 1973 Constitution had been ratified by citizen's assemblies. 

This was weaponizing the law & gave that era a semblance of constitutional authoritarianism.

We said: What is so - called "legal" is not always just.

When martial law was proclaimed, I was in an out of town school and my mother who happened to be separated for four years from her parents during the second world war suddenly ordered me to fly home.
I obeyed because parents know best.
There were no classes for two weeks or so.
It was such an uncertain juncture in time.
As a burgeoning social activist, I was part of a group which was into study sessions analyzing the problems of society.
A few years later, I decided to pursue studies about society and development like it was my personal reaction to the historical events happening and unfolding before my eyes.

What palpable changes do we see now in our institutions?
One change is the way we have reformulated the martial law provisions in our 1987 Constitution which now provides for both Congress and our Supreme Court to look into and inquire into the validity or factual basis of any martial law proclamation using their checks and balance functions. In this sense, we have been politically educated. We have institutionalized people power in our charter provisions such as recall, initiative and referendum.

But, we are still a very poor country. Our country is run by the oligarchy: by no more than 300 families that hold more than 70 percent of the national wealth.
Yet, our people are constantly always hopeful and resilient.
When one is in the rock bottom, one feels one has nothing to lose.

This time, we are placing our hopes in a political vision that is constantly evolving.
We have learned a lot of lessons from almost two decades of martial law which was legally justified in a colonial 1935 constitution.
We have since then changed that colonial martial law provision in our 1987 charter so that our children will never again experience that dark era in our history as a young nation.