I CELEBRATED my 21st birthday with banana cue for lunch. The year was 1982, and my career in government was obviously off to an inauspicious start.
I drowned the meager meal with a plastic cup of pineapple juice. P3 for the big day. That was all I could afford.
It consoled me that I was new in the office. With hardly any new friend or acquaintance yet, there was no one to embarrass but myself.
A couple of weeks earlier, on the second of January of that year, I joined the Civil Service Commission (CSC) as a personnel analyst (the central office where I worked was located at the Agrifina Circle, inside the Rizal Park in Manila, which has now been converted into one of the National Museum buildings). The year before that I was a supply clerk at the Philippine Heart Center (known as Philippine Heart Center for Asia at the time), receiving a salary of P450 per month.
Although commodity prices were not as prohibitive as they are now, I was hard pressed just to get by. I lived with my relatives to save on accommodation, and sometimes on food. I finished college, earned a bachelor's degree, on the benevolence of the families of my uncles and aunts, especially a maternal aunt who managed to migrate to the United States.
Even then, I had to scrimp. On many occasions I walked instead of taking public transportation. There were days when a stick of banana cue already looked like a feast.
I thought the sob story is worth rehashing because in some ways it has connections to what we remember today — the 40th year of a “bloodless” People Power revolt that brought in a new government after more than a decade of dictatorship.
The promise of a “new society” when Ferdinand E. Marcos Sr. came to power beckoned. Soon, reforms were evident in the way he organized the bureaucracy, topped with appointments of technocrats that represented the cream of the crop. Massive spending in infrastructure and showy investments, creating bunches of government corporations, left his constituency impressed.
But his appetite for power took its toll on the energy to balance the conflicting interests of his support base. In large measure gold, guns, and goons determined the outcome of the presidential election in 1969 that earned him a second term. Recourse to foreign borrowing to support more spending, shook the country’s balance of payments, sent inflation to unseen heights, rattled the economy into a recession, and left much of the poor poorer.
The resulting social unrest became the pretext for the declaration of martial law. On his way to becoming a president for life, Marcos jailed his critics, muzzled the press and padlocked Congress. That, along with an inhibited judiciary, made him a one-man administrator and, where dissent showed up, a wrecking ball.
The dictator needed at least three support groups to maintain the status quo: cronies, technocrats and the military. Unchecked by no one but himself, he issued decrees that favored private interests.
The atrocities in Samar island perpetrated by para-military groups securing a logging company owned by crony Juan Ponce Enrile spilled over provincial boundaries and blighted Eastern Samar, my home province. When the local population mounted resistance (many peasants, including members of the Catholic clergy, went underground), Enrile, who, as chief of the defense department oversaw the implementation of martial law, intensified the military presence in the area. The 1981 Sag-od, Las Navas, Northern Samar massacre that left 45 people dead, including women and children, had its parallel in many parts of Eastern Samar.
Hundreds among us, involuntarily displaced by poverty and fear of being caught in the crossfire, fled to safer ground. I was one of them.
At the CSC, my co-employees at first acted as if I did not exist when I started reading atop my desk old issues of the weekly We Forum magazine. All this time mass media was under government control. But the magazine was stubborn in its irreverence, printing news and opinion that dared to satirize official malfeasance. In time, some of my co-employees would discreetly ask to borrow a copy but could only go as far as unfolding them under their drawers.
When the 1983 Aquino assassination prompted the buildup of mass protests, my colleagues, especially those my age, had been roused by a divergent call to action. Some of us were taking time to join subvert meetings.
In three days from Feb. 23 to 25, 1986, our core group of seven, in office uniform, left the office (which now relocated to Diliman, Quezon City, just across the House of Representatives complex) at noon to join the protesters at EDSA. Due to throngs of flag-waving, chant-chewing kindred massing around the vicinity, vehicles could not wade through the whole stretch of the thoroughfare from East Avenue to Camp Crame, and farther south to Shaw Boulevard.
So we had to walk. It felt like each step was a count to liberation.
Forty years later, it feels like the march to freedom has been stunned by daylight robbery. Back to where the country was when the people discovered there was power in being powerless.
haberia@gmail.com
