When Brother Peter FSC, the dean of the College of Commerce at De La Salle in late 50's and early 60's called me to his office one morning, I knew I was in very, very deep.
I had rounded up a few schoolmates and made them contributors to an alternate campus newspaper that I published by using a mimeograph machine in the school's business office. I had quit from the official campus paper and had set up my own. The theme of the initial and only issue of the renegade paper was the youth's disaffection with our parents' generation.
Brother Peter was not amused. He considered expelling me. But then there were others, what to do with them? He knew he couldn't expel them all. There was also this additional factor in my favor: Brother Peter and I got along very well in those days. I worked on campus - in the Library and the Business Office - during my vacant hours.
So we publishers of the renegade newspaper were given a warning, never missed a day in school. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief - except the faculty moderator of the legitimate campus paper. He quietly steamed; he thought we got off easy.
I did not know it then, but my open defiance of the older generation - the generation of my parents - would turn out to be a part of the opening salvo in a worldwide societal realignment and upheaval that would span nearly two decades, the 60s and the 70s.
The Filipinos were just then waking up to the realization that not everything the U.S. did was righteous and just. The opposition to the Vietnam war was starting to build momentum. I was one of the marchers in the very first peaceful demonstration against the Vietnam War in front of the U.S. Embassy in 1964. I was scared, did not know what to expect. There were police cordons in spots along the road. I did not want to be billy-clubbed to death, which was all I could think about as I marched with candlelight along with all the others to the end.
In San Francisco, Seattle and other cities across the U.S., a new alternate culture was being invented by kids in their late teens and early twenties, all rejecting the wisdom of their elders. They were rebelling against the older generations' predilection for waging war that young people must fight and die at, but which the oldies had never adequately explained was a necessary war. They also rebelled against what they perceived to be the hypocritical culture of their parents' generation.
In Europe, the anti-American sentiment had metamorphosed into an open rebellion against the institutions, the established order, the enablers of American policies in Vietnam.
No one could explain China's rampaging youths breaking down doors in people's houses, seizing the old people living in those houses and parading them through the streets, branding them dunces, corrupt and reactionary.
The Cultural Revolution in China, which started in 1966, exposed the soft underbelly of Chinese society. That closed society - the one that developed out of sight from the rest of the world, behind the Bamboo Curtain - was being exposed by China's youth. The news that reached the world's press was grim: China was imploding. The youth everywhere were leaving school to spend a year, two years to cleanse China's society of its unwanted elements, mainly the older, corrupt generations that stifled economic growth.
Mao Zedong, the sublime Machiavellian, observed what was happening in the free world, saw the potential of tapping into the restlessness of the Chinese youth, and launched a movement that he knew would cleanse the country of the remnants of the old, pre-Communist order. The ideologically impure, the corrupt, the holdovers from the Kuomintang regime, Mao knew could be swept from positions of authority and prestige and ridiculed before the whole nation. It was also a way for Mao to get rid of his rivals.
Mao stoked the anger of the Chinese youth at their elders whom they perceived to be suffocating the growth of the Chinese revolution through corrupt practices and gross incompetence.
By the end of the Cultural Revolution in the late 60s, Chinese society had rid itself of corrupt, incompetent and reactionary elements, and Mao Zedong's victory over his enemies was complete.
China, the Sleeping Giant, was lean and ready to do battle in the global world of commerce and industry.
It would take the passing of Mao Zedong and the ascension of new technocratic leaders to launch China, finally, into the developing high-tech infrastructure that was being erected by IBM, Xerox, Bell Labs, Sony, Panasonic and their European and Japanese competitors.
China had its Cultural Revolution, the U.S. had its counter-culture that changed its music, its ideology, its racial and gender politics, its business culture, its military. Europe finally emerged from under the thumb of the U.S. and became a powerful counterweight to the domineering U.S. influence.
Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union saw their young people challenging the elders and demanding a better life and toned-down militarism. Much later, Soviet leader Gorbachev saw the handwriting long before everyone in the world did and allowed the European youth movement to tear down the Berlin wall, whose twentieth anniversary was observed this past week.
Japan and the rest of Asia flourished when the rules were changed from the pursuit of security and military muscle to the pursuit of exports.
In the Philippines, the youth did not prevail. They were crushed by the Marcos forces, specifically in the Battle of Mendiola, when demonstrators against the Marcos administration were routed by the police and military. After the declaration of martial law in 1972, the leaders of the youth movement were rounded up and incarcerated, some disappearing completely.
While China and the rest of the world was cleansed, made better, became responsive to the aspirations of their people, especially the youth, the Philippines only saw the brutal suppression of the people's fervor for social change.
Marcos initially promised the founding of a new nation steeped in the ideals of good governance, societal discipline and economic bonanza. What Marcos delivered was years of centralized corruption. Only Marcos and his cronies were allowed to be corrupt, to form armies, to exploit the country. The rest - those who lacked connections, who quietly toiled for an honest living - never even saw the crumbs. Even the crumbs belonged to those who curried favor.
While China got rid of its corrupt class, the Philippines merely changed the face of corruption in the Philippines. Just as old money is often overshadowed by new money, the old corrupt were merely bested by the new corrupt.
There was no Cultural Revolution to speak of. The Philippines remained the same, stayed in place, in fact, in many respects regressed, while the rest of Asia continued its march towards economic deliverance and eventually ascendancy. In the case of Japan, the ultimate reward was a GDP that rivaled even that of the U.S. by the late 1970s.
The other countries had their cultural revolutions, their societal realignments and cleansing. The Philippines had Marcos and Imelda and Supreme Court justices in a country where there was no justice.
This was why the incipient Cory revolution was doubly significant. It was a chance to get rid of the Marcos machinery and to remake Philippine society. Cory never saw it that way. She saw an opportunity to be Christ-like: to forgive one's enemies, including those who had killed her husband, and the communist insurgents. The country, especially elements in the military, saw this as weakness and after six years of the Cory presidency all that the country could show for its mini revolution was 7 military coups, brownouts galore and flights of capital.
It would be wrong to say that Cory did not finish the revolution because it never really started. In contrast, while Marcos snuffed the life out of the Filipino youth's idealism, he unleashed his army of Marcosites on the country to cleanse it of presumed corrupt and criminal elements, and of course his rivals.
In the early days and months of the 1972 martial law Philippines, there was an unmistakable flavor of a revolutionary regime. Marcos was a revolutionary in the mold of Mao Zedong, the difference was that Mao used the idealism of Chinese youth to advance his goals, while Marcos used the military. Mao worked to improve the lot of the Chinese people; Marcos stole from the people.
If Noynoy Aquino ascends to the Presidency next year, he must know that he has to do the exact opposite to what his mother did. Do not be too quick to forgive the corrupt, the incompetent, the enemies of the state. There must be justice from the top, there must also be clarity. Noynoy must instill a sense that it is not OK to be corrupt, to be incompetent, to rebel against the central authority, and there's hell to pay for the transgressors.
If Noynoy is destined for greatness, he must do so on the wings of the concept of accountability. The transgressors must be punished, so the average Filipino knows that society is changing.
Is a Cultural Revolution similar to China's or the United States' 60s and 70s possible in the Philippines? I doubt it. The Church would never allow it. We are also masters of the Erap and Pandak jokes. We even smile all the way to the gallows.
The only way we can remake society is by changing leaders through the democratic process - through the ballot box.
Filipinos intuitively know this. First, they responded by electing actors and famous personalities, hoping for good results. Now that experiment may be coming to an end.
What class or genre of leaders will Filipinos elect next? There are snippets of evidence that the quality of those presenting themselves to the electorate for consideration is swinging in the other direction.
It will take years, not just one election. But the May, 2010 elections are critical. If Filipinos do not start the cleanup next year, they will have to wait another six years to get started. A lot can happen in six years.
2010 is the key. Filipinos must indict most incumbents who are seeking reelection by voting them down. Start anew with a fresh slate of alternative candidates. Elect the best qualified candidates who are just coming onto the scene.
Keep doing this, until most of our leaders are clean and competent.
This is how a new nation is forged without resorting to arms and the kind of Cultural Revolution that Mao Zedong unleashed in 1966.
