DILIMAN, QUEZON CITY — The image of Imee Marcos raising her arms in victory sign, dancing, laughing and obviously gloating had seared my mind a few days ago.
Imee celebrated the decision of the Supreme Court to allow the burial of her father, President Ferdinand Marcos in the Libingan ng mga Bayani.
The decision meant the defeat of the pained but valiant efforts of human rights groups and surviving victims of the Marcos Martial Law to contest the order of President Rodrigo Duterte to give the dictator a resting place in the heroes’ cemetery.
I knew some of those who testified before the highest court by recalling their ordeal during their arrest, torture, and imprisonment many years ago.
However, I do not know their grief when they recounted the abhorrent events they endured.
Thus, the jubilant gesture of the dictator’s daughter is like spitting in the face of human rights victims whose causes also lived in me.
It is often that when confronted with an aporetic or bewildering issue, one searches the memory for discernment and guidance.
This holds true in the case of the highest court decision that sent me reflecting on my days as a student activist in Silliman University.
Was my activism worth all the trouble, considering that nowadays, the Marcoses have returned to the political area, no sweat. As to the memory of Marcos abuses and plunder, it is as if so little of it was left in the country’s collective sense.
Before I became an academic three years ago, I was a journalist for two decades. But in the early 1980s before that, I was an activist who was also a student-journalist.
There were many people, practices, and events that influenced my way of thinking while in Silliman, and certainly, there were a few individuals whose friendship and good counsel I kept to this day.
However, what appears to be abiding in those years was journalism that I practiced in the campus at the same time that I became an activist. How the two domains had merged could explain my participation in the anti-Marcos struggles.
The things I learned about journalism and its ethics in Silliman — truth-telling, giving voice to the lesser-heard, monitoring the exercise of power and with attention to its abuse, listening and attentive writing —- shaped my oppositional politics early on.
Such acts of journalism proved helpful when I sat down to hear the stories of farmers, dockworkers, poor urban dwellers, hacienda workers, and the like.
Their common experience was poverty but when they organized into unions, associations, or cooperatives to improve their lot, they were tagged as communists or subversives by the military thus, some of them were harassed, jailed, or killed.
Journalism is a reflexive process — things bend back on you to be reflected and re-presented in a new light.
I knew about the philosophical bases of the journalistic practice much later, but when I was learning the craft in Silliman, I thought that journalism should highlight the stories of injustices to redress them, in a way that explaining them would help readers understand the story and perhaps do something about them.
In other words, journalism starts with this idea of “let me explain” what is newsworthy in this particular event, or why we should even care.
One story stood out, that of a family whose members, including the father and mother, were hacked to death one night because one of their children was suspected to be a member of the New People’s Army guerrillas. This occurred during the last years of the dictatorship. However, one son tricked the assassins by playing dead, and despite the wounds he received, he survived to tell the story of how he, together with three other members of his family, “died” one night.
Occasionally, this horror would cross my mind.
I thought of this survivor when I received the news of the highest court giving a green light for the dictator’s burial at Libingan.
What was he thinking each time he looked at the scars on his fingers that he instinctively placed on his neck at the sight of a bolo aimed to cut his head off? Traumatic experience, like this one, lived on in bodily and psychological scar tissue to haunt the person for a long time.
Silliman was a matrix of activism of many students like me. The University’s commitment to truth and openness to ideas finds expressions in discussions we have had in classrooms and in communities that received us, a cohort of anti-Marcos activists.
It was often that some students who held contrary views, and who also despised our language, particularly the “isms” of our slogans, challenged our politics. And yet, it was also through this process that we learned about standards of making judgment, expressing our beliefs clearly, and working together because we believed that things could truly be changed.
As to how we defined our activism, it was inspired by an elegant, often-invoked phrase that philosophers have tried to explain the world but point is to change it.
The impending burial of Marcos at Libingan has made one think of how the past was incorporated into the present, particularly the memory of the struggle against the dictator that many today may have the faintest memory of what it was all about and what it meant.
It appears that the so-called democratic structures built after the fall of the Marcos dictatorship were not strong enough to withstand the battering by the resurgent Marcos family and its clique that do not seem to show signs of remorse.
To this day, Marcos and his associates have not been held to fully account for their crimes against the nation. Imee’s gloating and Bongbong’s recent media statements of a “comeback” indicated that the lessons of recent history were not learned quite well.
If journalism has indicated changes in the collective memory vis-í -vis the Marcoses today, maybe it is also fitting that journalism reflect on how it restages such memory.
This brings me back to journalism- cum-activism that had indelibly shaped me while at Silliman. Given that journalism actively intervenes into the flow of events and shapes them, it simply suggests that this particular activism is timeless or will not go out of style.
Ma. Diosa Labiste, Ph.D.
University of the Philippines-Diliman
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Diosa is with the journalism department of the College of Mass Communication in UP Diliman. She earned her PhD from the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, with focus on media, culture and society.