The Philippines and adobo

Title

Creator

de Joya, Antonio R.

Language

English

Year

1947

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Fulltext

THE PHILIPPINES AND ADOBO The formal surrender of Japan to the Allied Powers on board the battleship Missouri two years ago was more than a signal that the second world war had been terminated. To the Philippines, in particular, the signing of the docu ment of capitulation marked the end of a dream empire which, for four torture-filled years, had held this country in an iron grip. Those years will be remembered here as a period during which all freedom, grown dear through forty years of democratic tutelage, was held in abeyance: a period of hunger and want and misery which brought out the worst and the best in men. We say it brought out the best in men because the most ordinary Filipinos, who for years had worn the drab garb of mediocrity, rose to epic heights of heroism and thought nothing of sacrificing blood and even life in the cause of freedom. Looking back at V-J'Day, however, how many of us can truthfully declare that as the last shot was fired, we vowed that never again, as long as life endured, would we allow liberty to be trampled underfoot? How many of us told our selves then that the victory, bought with blood and sweat and tears, would be made tangible and remain unsullied? A mere handful. The rest of us merely shrugged our shoulders, occupied ourselves with the task of regaining the flesh that had been lost during the lean days of hunger and of rebuilding. 60 AUGUST, 1947 homes that had been razed to the ground, completely for getting whatever vows we might have made to concretize the liberty that had been regained. We must confess, in all honesty, that liberty has been used in most cases to further purely selfish ends;*and that even the declaration of Philr ippine independence has not aroused in the collective heart that sense of responsibility which should be a corollary to the privelege of freedom. But what, you will ask, has all this got to do with adobo. Simply this. Just as the perfect dish must be com pounded with the most exact amounts of vinegar, pepper and garlic, so is a substantially democratic Philippines com pounded with the most exact proportion of men’s ideals and of ideal men. And just as the addition of foreign condiments will spoil an otherwise perfect dish of adobo, so will the in troduction of graft and corruption and pragmatic methods of thought and of action destroy the very roots of a sound Philippine democracy. The simplest progeny of Juan de la Cruz will readily admit that the system prevailing at present in the Philip pines cannot be considered conducive to the development of a sound Philippine democracy. For Graft is considered the rule rather than the exception, and has borne strange fruit in the anomalies and frauds which continuously make the administration the goat of a free and militant press. Sound principles of government, which should not bow before political expediency, have been made to kowtow to party politics to such an extent that a man’s qualifications to hold public office are gauged, not so much by what he is, as by what he has done, will do or might perform for the benefit of the dominant political party. Filipinos may of course, shrug at individual instances of political favoritism or political craft, excusing them on the ground that “to the victors belong the spoils.” But we wonder if they realize that each governmental sacrilege de tracts just so much more from the substance of a democratic Philippines, substracts just a little more from the collective well-being, and reduces the Philippines to that abject state it occupied during the occupation, when the common people were considered as a serfdom at whose expense a small and 62 THE CROSS powerful clique might and did fatten itself. During the Occupation I had a friend with a certain degree of devil-may-care idealism in his system. His name was Ramon Cabrera. He believed in freedom and thought it •nothing extraordinary that his life shbuld be demanded in its cause. And because he believed in this freedom and be cause he felt that one life more or less did not matter as long as that freedom were regained by his people in the end, the Japanese killed him and buried him in a grave which he had refused to dig, for himself. I had a professor who, in the days before the war, oc cupied himself with matters no more serious than a problem in Physics or a kiss from his wife. And because he believed in that same freedom, they tortured him till he was a ghost of the Teodoro Fernando whom we had known, so horribly mutilated was he with horrible aching sores where his fin gernails had once been lodged. He had no more arms when his family saw him again, stark and cold in death, with no reassurance that his sacrifice would not have been in vain. That freedom for which these two brave men and count less others immolated themselves on a thousand unknown altars—was it freedom fraught paradoxically with corrup tion and greed and avarice? We think not; for surely no sane man would have given up his life for mattery so petty as these. We believe they died for a freedom that was clean and wholesome, a^freedom in which their people would have the privelege of establishing their otfn democracy, unham pered by crooked government and a more crooked official dom. We believe they died for a freedom which carried with it that national responsibility which is part of liberty’s heritage. As the second year after the death of the samurai system of serfdom draws to a close, it behooves us all to look deeply within ourselves and ask whether we have not betrayed the trust bequeathed to us by men like Ramon Ca brera and Teodoro Fernando. It is our task to see to it that the alien elements of selfishness and greed do not complete ly destroy the concept of real freedom in the Philippines, and reduce our adobo to a dish of tasteless meat. —Antonio R. de Joya

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