By IAN VICTORIANO
The generation of students who came before us, those who were drawn into revolution by the First Quarter Storm, has already been able to define and articulate its collective experience of awakening, initiation, participation, and perseverance in the struggle for social change. They have lived and articulated a great part of their generation’s history which has become a part of our historical consciousness.
The “graduation” from existentialism to activism, from alienation to participation in historic struggles, from Lennon to Lenin, and from Ghandi to Mao, at that time of Aquarius and Vietnam, has been the tale of awakening of this elder generation.
The shock and anguish at the declaration of military rule, the organization of the revolutionary underground, the political pitch battles with the monolithic machinery of the dictatorship, the war in the hills, the fear and capture and torture and death, is the story of continuing commitment to social practice.
These experiences have been signified in our culture and have become part of a history from which we draw lessons and inspiration today. They now touch our minds and move our history because they have been passionately lived and eloquently expressed. The challenge to articulate their specific historical experience is inevitably passed on to today’s generation of students as part of a continuing cultural and social revolution.
We who were too young to be caught in the center of the storm, who were made to sing hymns for the New Society during our first years in school, who lived our young lives in a different intellectual and political climate, what tales have we to tell?
Surely, this generation’s specific position in the historical development of the region has offered specific experiences and developed specific perceptions. What are our experiences, and how have they molded our consciousness, hence our lives?
For most of us, awakening has been a slow and painful process. And for quite a great number of this generation of students, it is still incomplete.
We entered the university at a time when the repression of the Martial Law years had taken its deadlier effect in the form of a barren intellectual life. The classrooms have long ceased to be places where we can analyze and understand the realities that we confront in our society outside, and we have not developed the intellectual rigor necessary for us to effectively criticize. When we raise questions, we do not find comrades with whom we can argue and agree. It is unfortunately true that most of us have not learned to live passionately for ideas, because the culture in which we lived gave no premium on thought. We were slow at recognizing the contradictions in our society because of a blindness forced upon us by conditions created by martial rule.
But reality has its own way of forcing itself into thought. The awesome and ugly truths of our condition slowly seeped into our minds, the civil strife in the countryside, military atrocities, human rights violations, the mockery of justice, and violations of our political rights were facts we slowly unearthed and pieced together to define our political consciousness.
Once having been politicized, we became sensitive to the machinations of dictatorial rule which we were born into. News about missing persons supposedly abducted by the military, about salvagings, crowd dispersals, and massacres, have become significant for those among us who were conscientious, while reports at barricades, pickets, rallies, marches, and even in encounters in the countryside have acquired new meanings. We shared the indignation of our elders and joined hands in action, too, for truly we have contributed our efforts to dislodging that political structure we protested.
We have had our particular experience as a generation of students that contribute to our decision to become involved in the fundamental issues of our time. That it has not been fully articulated as a collective experience may be because we are still too close to that experience or that the process of our politicization is not yet complete. Most of us still need to develop a comprehensive worldview and a set of ideas to which we would commit ourselves. The necessity of social revolution is a question a lot of us still have to face. It was the question confronted by the generation before us, thus making their act and experiences historically significant.
This generation is still looking for a spokesperson who will articulate its collective experience, its hopes and its dedication. It has responded to political tasks for the past years with its own activists. It is now in search of its poets and intellectuals ready to define their own particular comments on their own particular conditions.
Only when they have arrived can we be assured that we have lived off the wounds inflicted by martial rule. And it is the only way we can rationally live our history—that is, with utmost knowledge and consciousness of our position in unity with and criticism of those who came before us. ●
Published in the Collegian’s November 29, 1988 issue, with the headline “We Who Were Not Children of the Storm.”
Ian Victoriano wrote for the Collegian in the mid-1980s while he studied journalism at the UP College of Mass Communication, to which he had shifted from the UP College of Fine Arts. He writes and paints.
