A Valentine story, deleting
By Rex Catubig
IT’S been two years since it happened, the historic event on a February love month that made the world sit up and notice this tiny patch of islands, whose people became giant poster figures of bravery amid adversity.
But as I lay on my bed watching A Dangerous Life on my small TV screen one long lovey afternoon, the chronicle of events leading up to the People Power, a bloodless revolution that earned the world’s admiration, and the subsequent exile of the country’s dictator, I was filled with mixed emotions: I was again shocked and saddened, then outraged and emboldened, then finally relieved and felt an immense pride.
The decade of martial rule that weighed heavily on the nation’s psyche wrought irreparable damage to people’s lives yet became the trigger that unleashed the courage and bravery of the oppressed.
It was an epochal moment in my young life. Somehow, I felt that with patriotic passion, everything that I hold dear would be invincible.
But it did not happen that way. Somewhere in time, the monument to valor and freedom that we had painstakingly sculpted and erected, have now become the victim of eroded faith. Doubts have arisen that question the validity of past heroism. What we held as sacred is being held up as unsacred now.
Things are turning upside down. And effigies of denial are assuming the face of truth.
On a February month years ago, a Valentine story of a nation’s awakening and uprising against oppression and injustice seemed headed to forever. But that love story is being deleted and retold in a fanciful fashion, a parody of patriotism. Or in Tiktok parlance, mesmerizing yet menacing meme of deception.
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