NEVER AGAIN!
I look at my screen, I am restless but intense, memories come rushing. My childhood comes to me like a furnace, burning me, turning me into a red hot fiery coal. Anger hasn't left. Anger would no longer leave. The way poverty and memory of it never leaves.
I thought they were gone, my country. We chased them out. Pulled in the power of our number and threatened them with our united voice like the trumpets of Jericho. Their walls came tumbling down and they found themselves helpless, vulnerable, scared. They flew out and lived in other countries with their loots. We celebrated their departures as we mourned our Filipino martyrs who disappeared in their hands.
But my country, they came back through the backdoor, sneaking like snakes, like the Devil walking on his tail; their red, dirty eyes, (eyes that witnessed the deaths of many Filipinos in hunger and poverty and "salvaging") came back watching us, observing us, taunting us, secretely giggling inside their evil souls. They are sure those who suffered in their hands will be dead by this time. No one would remember their cruel era. They have succeeded in destroying the voice of the farmers and the poor and the activists. Everybody is dead. The past will quickly be forgotten in this forgetful land.
They failed to realize that not everyone forgets - how can one forget schoolmates who disappeared, were abducted, and were found buried in unknown graves, with their skeletons tied and their open-jawed skulls remained open (forever) crying to heaven for justice? My schoolmates' only crime was to demand an improvement of the lot of their countrymen. No one forgets the Filipino life that deteriorated down to the level of a rat's, thanks to their looting and stealing. How can one forget the corruption they spawned that until now is still being slapped on the Filipino face? Corruption that became so rampant and so natural and so common as the years went by. How can one forget when politicians of this country are so greedy that with a couple of pesos will destroy its political institutions? So brazen. So abusive of power.
This is what I have been afraid of. That's why I started my novels twenty years ago. I knew then that the decade 80's, our most miserable decade that produced all the problems we have today, would be forgotten and repeated. My fear materialized. It is now on our faces, a resurfacing political structure financed by Marcos cronies who still have the audacity and absence of remorse to destabilize. Why can't they destroy the status quo and rebuild what used to be their domain - they got away with it before, didn't they? Afterall, we Filipinos are stupid to them.
Because we never punished them - because the current leaders are so enamored with their money they won't hesitate to collude with them to safeguard their positions - because they don't give a damn - the ugly heads of Marcos cronies are here again.
The current politicians do not know what it is to be poor. They never lived in boarding houses. They never watched their hungry countrymen in the Luneta. They went to school in their father's Benzes. They had multitudes of maids. They were playing Computer games while the rest of us were fighting the tyranny of Marcos. The only thing they knew was to grab political positions without knowing a single thing about Filipinos.
But the Filipino is changing. It starts with me. I once was determined to abandon my fiction writing in favor of more enjoyable careless hobbies. But God and my country is asking me to return to political writing and story-telling. This recent impeachment of Davide is a sign. Let me continue my stories, stories that are being read a hundred times a day, from people living in forty-five countries.... let the whole world know the Pinoy criminals and the Pinoys who suffered under them.
