We were 16 or 17 when we left this city as high school students. True, some of us never changed location but we moved on and left four years of innocence behind. Many of us went to college here. Some of us went to the big city; the others went much further, across the ocean, into cities a lot bigger than our imaginations.
We have always called ourselves the Martial Law babies. Not exactly. We were at the gate of martial rule. Like the river fearing the heat, our generation in so many ways went underground. We tried to hide our idealism. We had to subvert our anger. In its place, we put up the gentlest of spirit that the Greed and Ambition of the times could allow. We were hurting but we were living through years that even the previous generations never thought would come to bear on this land. There was no war from outside. The war was inside the republic. It was killing its own people. It was maiming that thing called freedom.
Freedom was a big thing in our classrooms then. We debated about it. By the summer of 1972, we were like the other graduates ready to sail to the horizon. We were brave boys from the old Jesuit school with no gates and no guards and no I.D. requirements. Our counterparts were intelligent and lovely beings from the gated schools for girls, historically the oldest Escuela Normal in the country.
No two schools could be more different from each other. It was therefore to our shock that it would take only a summer and a few months in college when our destinies would be leveled by one thing: a nation going through one of its darkest histories. From then on, every thing was fair game.
Our generation started as a generation of no consequence. We did not belong to the 60s when major upheavals started to seep into social structures. We did not go to war because there were no World Wars. We looked to the previous generations and back as the brave generations. We were not angry enough to be called the Angry Generation. Put us up in the shelf and we would not have labels then.
Perhaps, it was the city that cared too much for us. Perhaps, it was our schools, with their respective histories giving our badge of courage. Perhaps, it was the period that we were in, an era of “neither here nor there.” The raging 60s was coming to an end and the 70s was barely at its start.
Somewhere there was a war but it was not ours to fight. Make Love Not War. That was a mouthful but that was our battle cry. Vietnam was so near and so far. Upheavals were happening from a distance. By the time we were freshmen, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were already assassinated. The Beatles, if you care, disbanded while we were learning to dance. The Constitutional Convention took place when we were juniors.
After a few months after our graduation from high school, about three months of new life in college, the Colgante Bridge collapsed killing hundreds of people. The elders saw in the event a bad omen. Weeks later, we all woke up to a day of no newscast. The radio stations were all shut down. Martial Law had been declared. Twenty years of uncertainty followed. In those inconstant years would live our generation.
We bid goodbye to our classmates. Some went hiding. Some were forced to go abroad. Some left the country. Some disappeared. Most of us continued, finding inspirations in the quotidian, in the everyday, looking for hope in other lives, in prayers. Some died for their ideas.
Thirty-five years hence, here we are back in the city of our dreams. It is not anymore the naïve, quiet place. Cafes are all over the city. Young men and women know their latte from cappuccino. We only knew then softdrinks, siopao, luglug, baduya, turon. The world has changed, and not changed.
I will look into the eyes of those who graduated from Colegio de Santa Isabel and the Ateneo de Naga in 1972 and I will find there something unaltered: those eyes that never lost the hope of breathing again what the great poet, Pablo Neruda called, “the air that connects us/with the buried man and with the dawn/of new beings that haven’t yet arisen.” Not bad, not bad at all.