What better way to return to blogging than to give my birthday greetings to the Internet which had just turned 20 last August 6 according to Sir Tim Berners-Lee because on the same date in 1991, the very first web page was born.

It’s amazing to look back on how much the Internet has changed the world, especially mine. If I recall it right, the very first time I encountered the Internet was when a friend of mine told me that I could look for pictures of Ferrari F1 cars using Google. It was after my introduction to the sport back in 1999. It was the British GrandPrix where F1 champion Michael Schumacher had that infamous crash resulting in a broken leg that forced him to sit out most of the season’s remainder. Since then, I had become an F1 enthusiast and a fan of the Ferrari F1 team.

After abusing Google for pictures of Ferrari cars, my next obsession was fanfiction stories based on the Gundam Wing series. It was around during that time that the anime was shown on GMA 7. Every day, I rushed home from school just to catch an episode.

Come 2002, in my last months of high school, my buddies succeeded in recruiting me to join Friendster, which was king of social networking sites back then, at least in the Philippines, and started to regularly haunt Internet shops to roam the world wide web.

Shortly, I stumbled upon HTML, free web hosts and Blogger.com. Two years later, I started The Four-eyed Journal, on a subdomain of a website intended for the fledgling advocacy group Lasallian Students for Justice and Peace in DLSU-D using WordPress.

Then I got on board Gmail via an invite from my college mentor, soon after I was blessed with a free .com.ph domain that has been the home of this blog since 2002.

Along the way, I received many checks and PayPal payments from Google, Text Link Ads, Chitika, LinkWorth and PayPerPost. The foreign exchange rates back then allowed me to stay in college and get my own laptop PC. The more fun part of it was the chance to meet a lot of cool folks, fellow bloggers and advocates locally and from around the globe.

It has been an incredible journey so far and I can’t imagine life without the Internet. We may be still stuck with pen and phone pals but I’ve had no regrets so far. Cheers to another 20 years and more of the Internet!

Image by Will Clayton

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Last Wednesday, I had the chance to participate in De La Salle University – Dasmarinas‘ EDSA Youth Day Candle Lighting Activity – a response to the call for a new People Power to surface in the hands of the youth who shall be the future builders of the country.

Also, that day, February 23 was designated as the Youth Day in celebration of teh 25th EDSA People Power Revolution by the EDSA People Power Commission.

The program was simple enough, DLSU-D invited over students from neighboring school National College of Science and Technology, along with UPAC, an NGO which supported the presidential campaign of Noynoy Aquino, son of the late Cory Aquino who became President because of the Edsa People Power revolution.

Together we marched outside the campus gates and onto the sidewalk, so that people outside would know and remember we are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Edsa People Power revolution.

Then we marched back inside, parading around campus to remind our own fellow students of the importance of the occasion and to encourage them to take part in it.

It culminated in a short interfaith prayer service and candle-lighting ceremony in which testimonies from DLSU-D’s own ranks who were part of the Edsa People Power revolution were heard, aimed at further reminding the youth of the task now at hand – continuing the revolution until the suffering of the Filipino people have been eliminated.

Though I have my own convictions on the role of the youth in moving this country forward, it is not necessarily rooted in the precepts and doctrines that arose from Edsa People Power revolution. It is the not the revolution I had mind, but it’s part of my history now and make no mistake I am proud of that history.

I just cannot find the words that will help me answer this question with satisfaction – what was the Edsa revolution all about?

So I am thankful to have found refuge in this remarkable speech made by the so-called ‘Dreamer of Edsa’ himself, the late Chino Roces – one of the few who have been in opposition to the Marcos dictatorship long before the late Cardinal Sin made the call to flock on Edsa and bring down that dictatorship.

I share it today believing that every Filipino will find something, if not all of it, in it that will rekindle the fire that has moved our people to greatness.

——–

Response on being awarded the Philippine Legion of Honor, Degree of Chief Commander

(Malacanan Palace, Manila, June 26, 1988)

Mrs. President, My Dearest Friends, Ladies and Gentlemen:

I accept the honor you have just given the Filipino people through me. I accept on behalf of countless faceless and nameless souls whose names we do not even know or remember, but whose deeds in defense of democracy, freedom, justice, truth, and peace are now engraved for all time and clime in the memory and in the heart of our nation and of all nations and peoples via the photograph of the Filipino woman slipping the stem of a rose into the barrel of a soldier’s rifle at Edsa. And then there was freedom regained.

To many of us, it was like a sequence from a dream which had its beginning in September 1972 when liberation from tyranny seemed elusive. It was the Impossible Dream, but only for those who accepted defeat out of indifference, apathy and cowardice. But for those who believed, and still do that ours is a nation of heroes, fifthy-eight million strong, it was a dream that would transform into a totally different Philippines of righteousness and hope.

For me, that dream goes on. For Edsa was just the beginning. And the dream of a Filipino nation – of freedom, of justice, of equal opportunity, of peace and brotherhood – must remain in our consciousness and conscience at all times, in all climes, True, it is the dream of the innocent. But it is also the dream of the brave and the heroic. And we must all keep on dreaming because those who never dream no longer have hearts that beat or breath that inspires or faith that overcomes.

Last night, I had a dream.

In that dream, you and I were in this very same room of Malacanan. The dream did not have an honoree. We were just here together – all of us with no defined role. The President was seated just as she is now, between Pacita and me, just as we now are. From what I can now recall of my dream, we were just staring at each other, there was total silence from many minutes until-until the President turned to me and said: “Chino would you please give me some unsolicited advice?”

I then quickly faced the President and repiled: “Cory (if I may call you such now, Mrs President) you know I will, because not even in my wildest dreams will I ever deny you or your littlest wish.”

Being the dreamer that I am, permit me then to go on dreaming in this autumn of my life. And so I give the unsolicited advice to you, Cory, and to all of you, my friends.

Please allow me to remind you, first: That our people brough a new government to power because our people felt an urgent need for change. That change was nothing more and nothing less than of moving quickly into a new moral order. The people believed, and many of them still do, that when we said we would be the exact opposite of Marcos, we would be just that. Because of that promise which the people believed, our triumph over Marcos was anchored on a principle of morality. And that for our people was and is the bottom line.

It was not the rice, roads, bridges, water, electricity and such other mundane things that people expected of us. It was, and is, much more: A moral order led by you Cory, and by you, my friends now gathered here. To our people, I dare propose that the new moral order is appreciated in terms of our response to graft and corruption in the public service. We cannot afford a government of thieves unless we tolerate a nation of highwaymen.

You will also recall that the thirst for justice was and remains the utmost desire of our people.

But even while we do all these, I must remind you again that the most understandable concept of the delivery of justice, in the perception of the Filipino, is the one that clearly implements a system of reward and censure. Yes, the Filipino forgives, and perhaps he has even forgiven those who raped his motherland, butchered his liberty and his sons, and degraded his dignity.

But he will never fogive us if, in the act of “reconcillation”, we fail to exact justice, if in the process of making the criminal pay his debts to society, we instead prove that crime pays because of our compromises and deals with the offender. And most important, if we the victors in the 1986 drama of good versus evil, show the slightest sign that we too adopt one standard for the wrongdoer who is poor and without connections, and another for the criminal who is rich and well-connected, then we would be proven liars.

Then of course, we must talk of Edsa and the struggle before and after Edsa. Let us not speak of Edsa as our franchise, whether we refer to those of us who began the long march with Ninoy in 1969, or those who joined us after Ninoy was murdered in 1983. The franchise, we must remember, belongs and belongs only to our people. The struggle for freedom was not forged on Ayala Avenue. Let us never allow our history to record that what happened in Edsa was planned in boardrooms and executive suites. Let us insist that Edsa was the long-delayed outpouring of the conscience of the littlest man, the littlest wife, and the littlest child – all of them Filipinos – from the littlest house of the littlest barangay. It was the triumph of the Filipino soul.

As we speak of so-called little people, let us not forget either that those who profess to be in their service must at least know them, if not from among them. The burden on the public servant then must be the ability not only to speak for the peple but also to act for the people. Biodata reflect talent. But we must insist that public service – first, last and foremost – place a premium on one’s record of commitment to the common tao of selflessness and dedication versus the all-too-common self-aggrandizement and service to vested interests, relatives and friends.

And this can be achieved only when we decide to see who live beyond the bridge of our nose, the confines of our conference rooms, the clotheslines in our backyard, and the land beyond the river. Somewhere out there are many honest, hardworking, selfless, God-loving Filipinos who may not be a doctor or master of something, or rich, but just the same Filipinos who will labor for love of country and fellow Filipino. They are waiting to be called to serve. Open the door and let them in.

I must end now before I experience a repeat of 1985. We were still trying to gather the one million signatures that Cory said might convince her to run against Marcos. The phone rang and Cory was at the other end of the line. And she told me: “Chino, tama na ‘yang kalokohan ninyo!”

Now I must tell all of you that no matter what you say, this old man called Chino will still go out to sea – there to gaze at the sky and the stars – still dreaming the impossible dream but never refusing to sleep.

For in the words of Robert Frost:

“The woods are lovely dark and deep
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep…
And miles to go before I seep.”

I thank you.

Source: pamphlet, with citation and response, provided courtesy of Ma. Ceres P. Doyo to Manuel L Quezon III for the book 20 Speeches that Moved A Nation. Anvil Publishing 2002

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On this day, 114 years ago, Jose Rizal was executed at the then Bagumbayan, outside the walls of Intramuros. Now, we all know that place to be Rizal Park.

Had Rizal not been executed, that place would probably still be called Wallace Field thanks to the Americans. Rizal’s death has not only changed that, but it has changed our nation’s history forever as popular belief has taught us that it led to the outbreak of the Philippine Revolution led by Andres Bonifacio and the Katipunan.

However, Patricio Mangubat would like to clarify that it wasn’t so. He points out in his post at New Philippine Revolution:

As an historiographer, let me correct the popular perception that Rizal’s execution on the thirtieth of December 1896 sparked the 1896 Revolution. Far from it.

Rizal’s execution was not the trigger that led to the August Revolt. No. It was his arrest and detention that Filipinos interpreted as a sign that there was no other recourse but to fight foreign aggression.

Had the Spaniards allowed Rizal to live, history would have been different.

And history would have been different indeed, not only if Rizal wasn’t executed but what if it had been so except that instead of remembering his death every year, we celebrate his life and many of his other great achievements aside from taking a bullet for the motherland.

Take for example Penelope V. Flores’ insights on Jose Rizal as a teenager, taking inspiration from an oil painting done by his friend and contemporary Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo which provided a glimpse of the young Rizal:

He met Felix Resurreccion Hidlago, the painter. He sat for an oil painting. It is the 2nd picture above. Resurreccion captured the teen-aged José Rizal. Felix is the consummate interpreter of character nuances. This is my favorite Rizal portrait….impish, rakish grin, tousled hair–which he tidies most of the time–off-skilted tie, twinkling eyes as if contemplating on doing something silly: in general, of being such a lovely teen-age matinee idol.

Felix brought this oil painting to Manila and presented it to Don Antonio Rivera, Rizal’s uncle and Leonora Rivera’s father. Visitors came to admire the artist’s signature, not the image. It was after all signed by a Resurreccion. Paciano actually glossed it over. Only later, when viewing from afar, that the resemblance to his own brother struck him. Paciano had actually forgotten the image of a young teen-ager. All this time, he was projecting the aura of Jose Rizal as a Europeanized medieval gentleman: the ilustrado: upright and proper (in his cuerpo (Rizal never wore an overcoat, but was dressed in the impeccable European style frock coat).

The artist in his painterly manner, gave us the humanized young essence of Rizal seldom brought out by our Rizalist scholars who want to present to us an intellectualized Rizal forgetting that like our own teen-aged offsprings and sibings, he too went through the process of teen-aged ambivalence as he was training to be the Great Hero that he had become.

Of course when we talk about Rizal and his execution, we cannot not talk about one of the reason he got into trouble with the Spanish authorities to begin with.

Basically, the Spanish friars wanted him dead because of the novels he wrote which exposed their abuses and virtual dictatorship of the Philippines. Rizal was not only branded as a heretic, he was ex-communicated for being a Freemason.

Sustines E. Laplana dug a little deeper into this bitter relationship between Rizal and the Catholic Church. She started with an intriguing snippet of a supposed letter of Josephine Brackern accusing the Catholic Archbishop in the Philippines for bribing the acting Governor General of the Philippines, Camilo Polavieja!

Truly, Rizal had become an icon of our history, his influence reaching beyond his generation. This has led to many writers, historians and even the ordinary folk to muse what would happen if Rizal were still alive today.

For instance, EQualizer Post points out that Rizal had long proposed the best tourism slogan for the Philippines in that immortal poem he wrote during his last moments alive:

Farewell, beloved Country, treasured region of the sun,
Pearl of the sea of the Orient, our lost Eden!
To you eagerly I surrender this sad and gloomy life;
And were it brighter, fresher, more florid,
Even then I’d give it to you, for your sake alone.

…

My dreams, when scarcely an adolescent,
My dreams, when a young man already full of life,
Were to see you one day, jewel of the sea of the Orient,
Dry those eyes of black, that forehead high,
Without frown, without wrinkles, without stains of shame.

And what if Rizal, being an avid traveller, would say if he encounters the TSA upon arriving at an American airport? The Vincenton Post aptly says:

If he were alive today, this polyglot, who loved to travel, would have told America’s Transportation Security Administration: “Touch me not!”

Clever play on Rizal, his life, execution and his legacy, we all come back to why we even set aside a national holiday for him, that all of us, in one way or another be inspired by Jose Rizal to help our countrymen and our motherland to reach great heights. Just like Urish Peter Jain:

Dr. José Rizal’s remarkable characteristics or intelligences, amazes me, and inspires me to follow his footsteps, in helping him attain his dream, even in this century. Like Rizal, I wish to be an inspiration to others, in helping people, realize their dreams, by continuously making people believe in themselves. Rizal is very admirable with his linguistic skills, this also inspired me, to work more on my speech, writing, foreign language speaking, and translating. Rizal is a well-known phycist, and following his path, he has also played an important role in my life, in choosing the medical profession. Rizal, to me, is a person that I think, is worth emulating, for he has found it’s way not only into the hearts of all Filipino’s, but especially to the entire world.

One way of paying homage to Rizal is to visit his monument and explore Rizal Park, there are lots to see and you’d walk away from it with a lesson or two about the man and our history.

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You can call it Bayani 101, and this is my share to the celebration of National Heroes Day for this year, to finally flesh out an idea I picked up from my good Professor in Debate class that there should be a subject in Philippine education dedicated to the lives of Philippine heroes.

No, this is not a proposal to abolish the mandatory Rizal course that every college student must take, rather it is a complementary course for it and that all students must take this.

This new subject will help every Filipino become acquainted with the numerous heroes in our nation’s history. Right from Lapu-lapu to Ninoy Aquino, the subject will inform the students about their lives, their work, their struggles, their causes, their ideals, the places where they grew up and lived, the people they mingled with and many more. From this body of knowledge, young students would learn many things, chief among them, the values of nationalism, courage, creativity, virtue and many more.

It should not be just about Rizal

It is just right that the other heroes of our nation be studied more instead of just Jose Rizal for it will provide a more complete picture of our history as a nation and as a people. Thanks to this subject, our heroes will no longer be just obscure and trivial names and pictures on post cards, stamps, statues, streets and places in our country. It will give flesh and spirit to their persons and in effect, giving a more human form to the Filipino identity.

The immediate and practical benefits of this new course would mean a revival of local research and history writing as the new subject would of course require textbooks and reference materials. Perhaps this would answer historian Ambeth Ocampo’s prayer that more and more young researchers and writers would focus on our history and the names that highlight its timeline. It’s about time that we see coloring books, comic books and puzzle books about Andres Bonifacio, Macario Sakay, Diego Silang and many more, instead of just Batman, Superman, Spiderman, the Powerpuff girls, Naruto or Dora the Explorer.

Both local and national

For the subject to be truly effective. Its version for the elementary students would focus on the national heroes, like Jose Rizal, Andres Bonifacio, Melchora Aquino, Juan Luna etc. For the high school and college levels, they could then start digging into local and regional heroes and history. Like here in Silang, Cavite, we have our local heroes like Gen. Vito Belarmino, Vicente Giron, Isidro Montoya among others. Their stories alone are worth so many books, papers and even performing arts productions.

The possibilities are endless, but the fruits are exciting and worth all the trouble. Hopefully, if ever this idea does become reality (ehem, calling the attention of Congress), the future celebrations of National Heroes’s Day would be more than just a holiday spent in the malls.

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The video has been very abundant in the web, especially in YouTube (part 1, part 2 & part 3) but the full text of that historic speech before a joint session of the United States Congress has been quite illusive.

As a tribute to President Corazon Aquino, on her funeral day, I shall reproduce the text of the speech below, which I found on MLQ3’s book: “20 Speeches that Moved a Nation”

———

Restoring Democracy by the Ways of Democracy

Three years ago, I left America in grief to bury my husband, Ninoy Aquino. I thought I had left it also to lay to rest his restless dream of Philippine freedom. Today, I have returned as the president of a free people.

In burying Ninoy, a whole nation honored him. By that brave and selfless act of giving honor, a nation in shame recovered its own. A country that had lost faith in its future found it in a faithless and brazen act of murder. So in giving, we receive, in losing we find, and out of defeat, we snatched our victory.

For the nation, Ninoy became the pleasing sacrifice that answered their prayers for freedom. For myself and our children, Ninoy was a loving husband and father. His loss, three times in our lives, was always a deep and painful one.

Fourteen years ago, this month was the first time we lost him. A president-turned-dictator, and traitor to his oath, suspended the Constitution and shut down the Congress that was much like this one before which I am honored to speak. He detained my husband along with thousands of others – senators, publishers and anyone who had spoken up for the democracy as its end drew near.But for Ninoy, a long and cruel ordeal was reserved. The dictator already knew that Ninoy was not a body merely to be imprisoned but a spirit he must break. For even as the dictatorship demolished one by one the institutions of democracy-the press, the Congress, the independence of the judiciary, the protection of the Bill of Rights-Ninoy kept their spirits alive in himself.

The government sought to break him by indignities and error. They locked him up in a tiny, nearly airless cell in a military camp in the north. They stripped him naked and held the threat of sudden midnight execution over his head. Ninoy held up manfully through all of it. I barely did as well. For 43 days, the authorities would not tell me what had happened to him. This was the first time my children and I felt we had lost him.

When that didn’t work, they put him on trial for subversion, murder and a host of other crimes before a military commission. Ninoy, challenged its authority and went on a fast. If he survived it, then, he felt, God intended him for another fate. We had lost him again. For nothing would hold him back from his determination to see his fast through to the end. He stopped only when it dawned on him that the government would keep his body alive after the fast had destroyed his brain, and so, with barely any life in his body, he called off the fast on the fortieth day. God meant him for other things, he felt. He did not know that an early death would still be his fate, that only the timing was wrong.

At any time during his long ordeal, Ninoy could have made a separate peace with the dictatorship, as so many of his countrymen had done. But the spirit of democracy that inheres in our race and animates this chamber could not be allowed to die. He held out, in the loneliness of his cell and the frustration of exile, the democratic alternative to the insatiable greed and mindless cruelty of the right and the purging holocaust of the left.

And then, we lost him, irrevocably and more painfully than in the past. The news came to us in Boston. It had to be after the three happiest years of our lives together. But his death was my country’s resurrection in the courage and faith by which alone they could be free again. The dictator had called him a nobody. Two million people threw aside their passivity and fear and escorted him to his grave, and so began the revolution that has brought me to democracy’s most famous home, the Congress of the United States.

The task had fallen on my shoulders to continue offering the democratic alternative to our people.

Archibald Macleish had said that democracy must be defended by arms when it is attacked by arms and by truth when it is attacked by lies. He failed to say how it shall be won.

I held fast to Ninoy’s conviction that it must be by the ways of democracy. I held out for participation in the 1984 election the dictatorship called, even if I knew it would be rigged. I was warned by the lawyers of the opposition that I ran the grave risk of legitimizing the foregone results of elections that were clearly going to be fraudulent. But I was not fighting for lawyers but for the people whose intelligence I had implicit faith. By the exercise of democracy, even in a dictatorship, they would be prepared for democracy when it came, and then, also, it was the only way I knew by which we could measure our power even in the terms dictated by the dictatorship.

The people vindicated me in an election shamefully marked by government thuggery and fraud. The opposition swept the elections, garnering a clear majority of the votes, even if they ended up, thanks to a corrupt Commission on Elections, with barely a third of the seats in parliament. Now I knew our power.

Last year, in an excess of arrogance, the dictatorship called for its doom in a snap election. The people obliged. With over a million signatures, they drafted me to challenge the dictatorship. And I obliged them. The rest is the history that dramatically unfolded on your television screens and across the front pages of your newspapers.

You saw a nation, armed with courage and integrity, stand fast by democracy against threats and corruption. You saw woman poll watchers break out in tears as armed goons crashed the polling places to steal the ballots but, just the same, they tied themselves to the ballot boxes. You saw a people so committed to the ways of democracy that they were prepared to give their lives for its pale imitation. At the end of the the day, before another wave of fraud could distort the results, I announced the people’s victory.

The distinguished co-chairman of the United States observer team in his report to your President described that victory:

“I was witness to an extraordinary manifestation of democracy on the part of the Filipino people. The ultimate result was the election of Mrs. Corazon C. Aquino as President adn Mr. Salvador Laurel as Vice-President of the Philippines.”

Many of you here today played a part in changing the policy of your country towards us. We, Filipinos, thank each of you for what you did: for, balancing America’s strategic interest against human concerns, illuminates the American vision of the world.

When a subservient parliament announced my opponent’s victory, the people turned out in the streets and proclaimed me as President. And true to their word, when a handful of military leaders declared themselves against the dictatorship, the people rallied to their protection. Surely, the people take care of their own. It is on that faith and the obligation it entails, that I assumed the presidency.

As I came to power peacefully, so shall I keep it. That is my contract with my people and my commitment to God. He had willed that the blood drawn with the lash shall not, in my country, be paid by blood drawn by the sword but by the tearful joy of reconciliation.

We have swept away absolute power by a limited revolution that respected the life and freedom of every Filipino. Now, we are restoring full constitutional government. Again, as we restored democracy by the ways of democracy, so are we completing the constitutional structures of our new democracy under a constitution that already gives full respect to the Bill of Rights. A jealously independent Constitutional Commission is completing its draft which will be submitted later this year to a popular referendum; when it is approved, there will be congressional elections. So within a year from a peaceful but national upheaval that overturned a dictatorship, we shall have returned to full constitutional government. Given the polarization and breakdown we inherited, this is no small achievement.

My predecessor set aside democracy so save it from a communist insurgency that numbered less than 500. Unhampered by respect for human rights, he went at it hammer and tongs. By the time he fled, that insurgency had grown to more 16,000. I think there is a lesson here to be learned about trying to stifle a thing with the means by which it grows.

I don’t think anybody, in or outside our country, concerned for a democratic and open Philippines, doubts what must be done. Through political initiatives and local reintegration programs, we must seek to bring the insurgents down from the hills and, by economic progress and justice, show them that for which the best intentioned among them fight.

As President, I will not betray the cause by which I came to power. Yet equally, and again no friend of Filipino democracy will challenge this, I will not stand by and allow an insurgent leadership to spurn our offer of peace and kill our young soldiers, and threaten our new freedom.

Yet, I must explore the path of peace to the utmost for at its end, whatever disappointment I meet there, is the moral basis for laying down the olive branch of peace and taking up the sword of war. Still, should it come to that, I will not waver from the course laid down by your great liberator: “With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the rights as God gives us to see the rights, let us finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and for his orphans, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Like Lincoln, I understand that force may be necessary before mercy. Like Lincoln, I don’t relish it. Yet, I will do whatever it takes to defend the integrity and freedom of my country.

Finally, may I turn to that other slavery: our $26 billion foreign debt. I have said that we shall honor it. Yet must eh means by which we shall be able to do so be kept from us? Many conditions imposed on the previous government that stole this debt continue to be imposed on us who never benefited from it. And no assistance or liberality commensurate with the calamity that was visited on us has been extended. yet ours must have been the cheapest revolution ever. With little help from others, we Filipinos fulfilled the first and most difficult condition of the debt negotiation the full restoration of democracy and responsible government. Elsewhere, and in other times of more stringent world economic conditions, Marshall plans and their like were felt to be necessary companions of returning democracy.

When I met with President Reagan yesterday, we began an important dialogue about cooperation and the strengthening of the friendship between out two countries. That meeting was both a confirmation and a new beginning and should lead to a positive results in all areas of common concern.

Today, we face the aspiration of a people who had known so much poverty and massive unemployment for the past 14 years and yet offered their lives for the abstraction of democracy. Wherever I went in the campaign, slum area or impoverished village, they came to me with one cry; democracy! Not food, although they clearly needed it, but democracy. Not work, although they surely wanted it, but democracy. Not money, for they gave what little they had to my campaign. They didn’t expect me to work a miracle that would instantly put food into their mouths, clothes on their back, education in their children, and work that would put dignity in their lives. But I feel the pressing obligation to respond quickly as the leader of a people so deserving of all these things.

We face a communist insurgence that feeds on economic deterioration, even as we carry a great share of the free world defenses in the Pacific. These are only two of the many burdens my people carry even as they try to build a worthy and enduring house for their new democracy, that they may serve as well as a redoubt for freedom in Asia. Yet, no sooner is one stone laid than two are taken away. Half of our export earnings, $2 billion out of $4 billion, which was all we could earn in the restrictive markets of the world, went to pay just the interest on a debt whose benefit the Filipino people never received.

Still, we fought for honor, and, if only for honor, we shall pay. And yet, should we have to wring the payments from the sweat of our men’s faces and sink all the wealth piled up by the bondsman’s two hundred fifty years of unrequited toil?

Yet to all Americans, as the leader of a proud and free people, I address this question: has there been a greater test of national commitment to the ideals you hold dear than that my people have gone through? You have spent many lives and much treasure to bring freedom to many lands that were reluctant to receive it. And here you have a people who won it by themselves and need only help to preserve it.

Three years ago, I said thank you, America, for haven from oppression, and the home you gave Ninoy, myself and our children, and the three years of lives together. Today, I say, join us, America, as we build a new home for democracy, another haven for the oppressed, so it may stand as a shining testament of our two nation’s commitment to freedom.

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