UP’s sporting chant claims its students are all brains and brawn: matatapang, matatalino, walang takot kahit kanino (brave, smart, have no fear of anyone).
This proud boast is hallmark of the quick-wits mind-set instilled as soon as you set foot inside UP’s paint-flecked classrooms. When class starts, there’s a mood that grips you: you sit there ready for anything, you have to fling modesty and inhibitions out the window when you speak, you have to sound like you understand everything when you answer.
What a way to build character, that’s for sure. Those who thrive in such atmosphere will flourish anywhere.
And while our basketball, cheerleading, and swimming teams bring it all out in the sports arena,there are those who take this brand of hubris to a real-life battlefield altogether.
Recca Monte and Perper Cagula were two of such kind, iskolars ng bayan (scholars of the people) who became guerilla fighters of the New People’s Army (NPA). Leaving behind their student worries of rising tuition, they hied off to the mountains to confront far more serious problems.
In UP, at least I know so in Diliman, an NPA is what our professors were when they were younger, or what the students wanted to be. The NPA was a legitimate career option for those from the Martial Law generation, and a romanticized notion for those who are disillusioned with present politics.
Like Che Guevarra, NPAs roamed the countrysides to carry out land reform, protect the people from state oppression, render revolutionary justice. That’s what we were told, what we read from the voluminous records in the library archives, and yes partly, what we imagined from pictures and videos online.
At the same time, it seems hard to lionize the NPA when in mainstream news, they are associated with revolutionary taxes and barracks raids. They clash with army or the police in “encounters”, and end up dead or in jail. It’s not even something they explain in the movies, not with mere brief exposure of Jericho Rosales in Kailangan Kita or Piolo Pascual in Dekada 70.
So I choose to perceive them in the types of men and women they have recruited. Recca and Perper – young, agile, upright, promising – were among the best of us. I knew them both as campus activists who can hold your attention when they talk about current events.
They were tireless. Recca’s team and our team, assigned to do room to room discussions for the budget campaign, would vie over the numbers at end of the day. Recca would report hers back with a smile. Perper, one time I was in Mindanao, was feverish and confined at the hospital. He wanted to check himself out even before he was cleared for dengue so we could round up the student council members.
Why did they choose to channel their energies, discipline, and idealism towards a larger audience and higher goals? Why did they turn their backs to comfortable, bourgeois lives and snub the dictates of convention? Why did they made the ultimate sacrifice of themselves in these godforsaken times?
I say, it’s because this is the real kind of Oblation, the offering of oneself to others.
When I got word they had died in such dreadful circumstances – in encounters up north and down south respectively – I had to contend with shock, as I had not known where they were, and then a maelstrom of emotions. I give way to piercing, bittersweet sorrow and never know if this is grief or fatigue. I don’t get out of bed.
How selfish, I see now. It’s not how Recca or Perper would have wanted me or anyone else to react. So I pick myself up, even while shaken, to see how else to carry on their work.
The impact their deaths make is significant. One, because they are outed as warriors when the war seemed over, and two, because they are young ones from the generation that was empowered with technology, and was told they could change the world with a click or two. A powerful reminder it makes: first, that the war for social justice isn’t over, and second, that the battles are not waged in the cities or in the comforts of home.
Continuing the work for equality and egalitarianism takes many forms. It’s easy to claim the best of intentions to “serve the people” as you work in government, in private firms, in NGOs, but it’s tough to recognize the larger cause. No offense meant, not especially to the pure-hearted not least in the military. But it’s for us to ponder now if our personal dedications and sincerities are enough to push for deep-seated change.
For Recca, Perper, along with fellow NPAs who died as fighting maroons in the past decade – Erika Salang, Tanya Domingo, Ian Dorado, Daniel Imperial, Christine Puche, AJ Jaramillo – the choice was clear. When UP challenged them to be the best and the brightest, to be social agents of change, to be pag-asa ng bayan (hope of the motherland), they went to the hillsides and waged a revolution from the outside in, from the bottom up.
This proud boast is hallmark of the quick-wits mind-set instilled as soon as you set foot inside UP’s paint-flecked classrooms. When class starts, there’s a mood that grips you: you sit there ready for anything, you have to fling modesty and inhibitions out the window when you speak, you have to sound like you understand everything when you answer.
What a way to build character, that’s for sure. Those who thrive in such atmosphere will flourish anywhere.
And while our basketball, cheerleading, and swimming teams bring it all out in the sports arena,there are those who take this brand of hubris to a real-life battlefield altogether.
Recca Monte and Perper Cagula were two of such kind, iskolars ng bayan (scholars of the people) who became guerilla fighters of the New People’s Army (NPA). Leaving behind their student worries of rising tuition, they hied off to the mountains to confront far more serious problems.
In UP, at least I know so in Diliman, an NPA is what our professors were when they were younger, or what the students wanted to be. The NPA was a legitimate career option for those from the Martial Law generation, and a romanticized notion for those who are disillusioned with present politics.
Like Che Guevarra, NPAs roamed the countrysides to carry out land reform, protect the people from state oppression, render revolutionary justice. That’s what we were told, what we read from the voluminous records in the library archives, and yes partly, what we imagined from pictures and videos online.
At the same time, it seems hard to lionize the NPA when in mainstream news, they are associated with revolutionary taxes and barracks raids. They clash with army or the police in “encounters”, and end up dead or in jail. It’s not even something they explain in the movies, not with mere brief exposure of Jericho Rosales in Kailangan Kita or Piolo Pascual in Dekada 70.
So I choose to perceive them in the types of men and women they have recruited. Recca and Perper – young, agile, upright, promising – were among the best of us. I knew them both as campus activists who can hold your attention when they talk about current events.
They were tireless. Recca’s team and our team, assigned to do room to room discussions for the budget campaign, would vie over the numbers at end of the day. Recca would report hers back with a smile. Perper, one time I was in Mindanao, was feverish and confined at the hospital. He wanted to check himself out even before he was cleared for dengue so we could round up the student council members.
Why did they choose to channel their energies, discipline, and idealism towards a larger audience and higher goals? Why did they turn their backs to comfortable, bourgeois lives and snub the dictates of convention? Why did they made the ultimate sacrifice of themselves in these godforsaken times?
I say, it’s because this is the real kind of Oblation, the offering of oneself to others.
When I got word they had died in such dreadful circumstances – in encounters up north and down south respectively – I had to contend with shock, as I had not known where they were, and then a maelstrom of emotions. I give way to piercing, bittersweet sorrow and never know if this is grief or fatigue. I don’t get out of bed.
How selfish, I see now. It’s not how Recca or Perper would have wanted me or anyone else to react. So I pick myself up, even while shaken, to see how else to carry on their work.
The impact their deaths make is significant. One, because they are outed as warriors when the war seemed over, and two, because they are young ones from the generation that was empowered with technology, and was told they could change the world with a click or two. A powerful reminder it makes: first, that the war for social justice isn’t over, and second, that the battles are not waged in the cities or in the comforts of home.
Continuing the work for equality and egalitarianism takes many forms. It’s easy to claim the best of intentions to “serve the people” as you work in government, in private firms, in NGOs, but it’s tough to recognize the larger cause. No offense meant, not especially to the pure-hearted not least in the military. But it’s for us to ponder now if our personal dedications and sincerities are enough to push for deep-seated change.
For Recca, Perper, along with fellow NPAs who died as fighting maroons in the past decade – Erika Salang, Tanya Domingo, Ian Dorado, Daniel Imperial, Christine Puche, AJ Jaramillo – the choice was clear. When UP challenged them to be the best and the brightest, to be social agents of change, to be pag-asa ng bayan (hope of the motherland), they went to the hillsides and waged a revolution from the outside in, from the bottom up.