Freedom

As a country, we are just 109 years old. We were supposed to have been the first republic in Asia on 12 June 1898. But the freedom our first revolutionary heroes fought for and won from the Spaniards, who controlled our minds and souls for more than 300 years, was short-lived. The Americans came to wrest the freedom we just won.

One tragedy in our history is that we have been turned over from one colonial master to another. The Spaniards and the Americans finally left, but we have yet to free ourselves from the enslaving impacts of colonization.

Now we are still struggling to free ourselves from the impact of being cloistered in a convent for almost four centuries and for being bombarded with Hollywood for almost a century, not to mention decades of IMF and the World Bank.

But within and among us, we have yet to free ourselves from other forms of slavery and subjugation. We have to liberate ourselves from ghosts of the past, which were never exorcised and which continue to resurrect and haunt us.

Very much around us is the ghost of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, whose martial law regime brought a climate of fear. Such climate still remains and no other than Supreme Court Justice Renato Puno had expressed concern and alarm over the still many unsolved political killings and other human indignities still happening in a supposed democracy.

Puno cited other ghosts – the ghosts of Garci and the ghosts of poverty. Even as Garci continues to haunt us, another Garci incarnate surnamed Bedol has come out to make us puke.

Puno was right about poverty. While top officials thump their breasts and congratulate themselves for what they claim is a booming economy, the poor continue not to feel the impact of so-called economic growth. A tank of liquefied petroleum gas remains expensive at P550. No wonder my neighbors, in search of firewood, continue to cut the branches of the trees in our neighborhood, threatening the remaining trees in our village.

There are other various forms of slavery from which we should free ourselves. We still have to outgrow and transcend our bigotry, prejudices and intolerance.

As we have said in past columns, the world is better seen from the prism of a rainbow. But many of us still view the world in black and white.

And there’s our slavery from our own materialist and consumerist ways. We think the planet is something we can squeeze like a lemon for our greed. Now the planet is getting warmer and our climate is changing, bringing disasters of catastrophic proportions.

With the way things are, we have yet to win our real freedom, individually and collectively.