SENSE OF HISTORY makes us remember “historical details”; more importantly, it highlights the underlying storyline of a developing essence.
. Take this date September 21. For Filipinos, this is a date to remember Martial Law and the details of its declaration and the sufferings we endured on our civil liberties (and human dignity) because of it. Other nations and peoples have had their equivalents of it. Many details have varied from country to country but they were underpinned by the same essence. This same date is the International Day of Peace. To inaugurate the day, the “Peace Bell” is rung at the United Nations headquarters in New York. The bell is casr from coins donated by children from all continents, as a reminder of the human cost of war.
Peace and military dominance should therefore be together as twin themes, the two sides of a coin, whenever the sense of history in the Philippines commemorates September 21. These themes should always be taken together profoundly as the inseparable concerns of War and Peace, not merely the concern for the victims of the logic of war and its “milder” versions like martial law declarations, but more in the context of our inevitable evolution from pre-human consciousness to full human consciousness, as “the universe is unfolding as it should.”
Along this evolutionary path, the incessant preparations for war and the actual occurrence of it are conclusive proof that we are still in the pre-human stage where the peace we are still working for is just still a series of tension-filled ceasefires, where the logic of force prevails over the force of logic, and where antagonism is presumed until unity is proven. This context thrives in the control by groups of people over stockpiles of weapons that are used or threatened to be used to eliminate other groups of people and their respective civilizations from the face of the earth. Threaten to end the life of fellow humans, display your capability to do it, and you get to control their lives effectively. Such is the human evolutionary significance of professional soldiery, dehumanizing the people at the barrel end of the rifles and cannons into maleable slaves and veritable domestic animals, while also dehumanizing the people holding the guns as mere efficient gun-holders and trigger-pullers, no more than “intelligent” robotic parts of the killing machines, as much threatened by its bullets as the intended victims if they as much as start heeding their own consciences and using their own minds. About the only glamor or “dignity” accorded this profession is spun by the magic of Hollywood and the people’s tendency to admire their slave masters and their own torturers. This Stockholm Syndrome works well while, in the long periods of preparation for war, including civil war waged by governments on its own citizenries, tyranny merely dangles the Damocles’ Sword to effectively intimidate people while it is not yet necessarily to eliminate them.
Recalling Martial Law in the Philippines would bring in the name Ferdinand E. Marcos, but such detail is trivial; social realities and levels of consciousness in the world and in the country are more to blame for Proclamation 1081. These same realities and levels have persisted and can very well bring forth many repeats, and if we are not alert to the essence of things, we will fail to prevent it or, worse, even applaud and salute it. Therefore, recalling only the heroics of individuals in the 14-year dramatic struggle to topple that particular dictatorship without seeing the essence and without being being consistent to that essence is to say to one another, we have not learned the lessons, we are ready to repeat the course!
The only real and lasting peace is one which we can describe as synergy of all for the good of all; where the force of logic prevails over the logic of force; where we discern and intuit, as operational reality and overall context, the ONENESS OF ALL. Only a Filipino nation who has fully developed or fully revived a culture actually living in the teamwork and harmony of bayanihan, that banishes separativeness and exploitation, can be a nation at peace with itself and with the world.
May such peace prevail on our planet the soonest, starting with each heart.
Magsanib-lakas, Pilipinas! Ihandog sa mundo ang kaisahang totoo!
The Peace Bell, Quezon City, Philippines
September 21, 2009
Ed Aurelio C. Reyes of Subic, Zambales
Lead Founder and Secretary-General, Pamayanang SanibLakas ng Pilipinas
Lead Founder and National Spokesperson, Kamalaysayan Solidarity on Sense of History
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