Future Heroes

Viewpoint : The heroes we never were

Juan Mercado
Inquirer News Service

"HERO" was the favorite word of the week. The word popped up everywhere -- from the convoluted impeachment debates, the Ramon Magsaysay Awards rites to the Libingan ng mga Bayani [Heroes' Cemetery] memorial rites.

"What we have is a crisis of heroes," wrote Inquirer columnist Antonio Montalvan II. Essays on the late President, written by students, he said, revealed youngsters groping for values that Ramon Magsaysay embodied.

In the House of Representatives, is a case of "too late the hero" unfolding? asked constitutionalist Joaquin Bernas, S.J. Unusually shy House members hint that they'll vote for impeachment -- but only in plenary, not in committee. So far, the opposition has lassoed only 49 of the 79 signatures needed to prevent premature expiry of the impeachment complaint.

If the vote collapses in committee, interest in the plenary sessions evaporates, Father Bernas points out. That's the lesson of past impeachments. Legislators then morph into truants.

"We can't all be heroes," Will Rogers once cracked. "Somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by." Is that the reason for this shy-violet routine?

"I see greed, I see indifference, I see apathy … when I listen to the radio or read the papers," Taguig Mayor Freddie Tiñga lamented at the National Heroes Day rites. "It's the heroes I do not see."

"Yet, if one only looks in the right places, one would find heroes," Tiñga said amid the graves of heroes (excluding, so far, the best Filipino dictator money could buy). Today's unsung heroes range from citizens who share with the poor to ordinary policemen who turn down bribes.

"Many heroes lived before Agamemnon," the Greek poet Horace wrote in 65 B.C. "But all are unknown and unwept, extinguished in everlasting night, / because they had no spirited chronicler."

Well, PO2 Guinan Ibrahim and PO1 Jose Calibuso had the Inquirer and other media. Just after Tiñga's speech, they nailed a thief and returned P1.28 million to the victim's family. "Not a centavo was missing," their superiors said. "These are Northern Police District heroes."

Concern about "values that endure even after the sun goes out" is welcome. The country suffers, Montalvan says, from a "crisis of saints -- the self-proclaimed variety, that is." They claw for today's version of Horace's "spirited chronicler": the front page or prime-time TV.

So, I dug up my dog-eared copy of "The Heroes We Never Were." Skeptical University of the Philippines graduates cheered National Scientist Dioscoro Umali who delivered this address shortly before his death. Excerpts:

"I wonder if our generation may have failed your generation," the dean diffidently began. Despite undeniable achievements, like broadened literacy and longer life spans, "our profligacy of years past dissipated your inheritance of abundant God-given resources … and in politics, your heritage from us will be a mixed bag.

"We do not inherit the land from our parents," Umali recalled the old peasant saying. "We merely borrow land from our children." But these resources were wasted recklessly.

"We endangered your capacity to provide daily bread for your families, from the land you loaned us. As prodigal parents, we radically altered your future. Greed of the past has seen to that. We lowered the threshold for violence by breeding social unrest. Above all, you will have little time left to correct our failures.

"We stripped the land of its beauty. Your children will no longer thrill, as we once did, to the heart-stopping dive of a hawk…. The rich texture of Philippine mahogany will be a quaint story for them. Their panoramas will be of drab landscapes, blanketed by sterile cogon grass, not the verdant meadows we knew as youngsters.

"And the bitter tragedy is that these victims are our grandchildren: 'flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone.'

"Part of that legacy is a 'gathering storm,' stemming from failure to ease poverty, lag in agrarian reform, population pressure --and elite indifference. What passes for national debate were the 'charades of yesterday's men.' Are we not all in danger of losing sight of the real future?

"Candor compels me to warn that … your children will be drafted to quell future insurgencies and other consequences of today's unwillingness to accept the social responsibilities of wealth," he said.

"We hope that you learn the lesson we never fully grasped: that a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions; that sharing and equity constitute the first seeds of your survival. Realism compels me to say: Be the heroes we never were -- or perish."

All citizens, especially those gifted with education, are called to "heroic service," Umali told the graduates. All must seek, in their careers, to increase the options of people beyond shared poverty. It is critical to craft people-centered policies and demand accountability from government.

Back those who would nurse the blighted landscape, he urged. "Nature has an amazing God-given capacity to regenerate. The debris are soon swept away by nature's forgiveness, once the hand of man is no longer raised against her."

The disciples' plea "at Emmaus strikes a responsive chord for people of my generation: 'Stay with us, Lord. For the day is now far spent. And it is almost evening.'

"In our twilight years, there is a desperate hope, in many of us, that your vision will see beyond the debris we left to what can still be retrieved and rebuilt. Go and be the heroes we never quite managed to become -- and live."