Lessons in heroism

Over the weekend, P-Noy presided over the unveiling of a towering brass monument to Jose Rizal in Calamba, Laguna, the tallest cast statue of him in this country or the world. It was Rizal’s 150th birth anniversary. For the occasion, P-Noy asked his countrymen to emulate the national hero by hewing to the straight path, the matuwid na daan.

As is his wont, and strength, he delivered his remarks in Filipino. Translated into English, he said: “Faced with many crossroads, from his time as a young man up to the time he became the hero who gave up his life for his Motherland, Rizal never strayed from the straight path. Not everyone is called to offer his life for his country, but for most of us, heroism can be measured in the crossroads we face every day. Like Rizal, we can always embrace the matuwid na daan.”

It’s not a bad idea. I’ve dwelt on the same point on many occasions in the past: The heroic choices in life, the character-defining moments in life do not always take the form of one huge life-and-death decision. They invariably take the form of small decisions at various crossroads that accumulate into the path one has taken in life. You turn hero or heel over time, not overnight with a dramatic choice to die for your country or not.

It’s not a bad idea, but it lacks a sense of proportion. Even if you look at heroism as a lifelong series of choices rather than one single “ang mamatay nang dahil sa iyo” moment, simply choosing to hew to the matuwid na daan doesn’t quite capture the essence of Rizal’s life, the grandeur of Rizal’s heroism. Or Rizal’s matuwid na daan was a superhighway compared to the side street its current version suggests. Government itself would do well to understand it and learn from it.

First off, the corruption Rizal saw and fought against was much broader than the mere theft of money. It was also the lash of the whip the indio was being subjected to, denied the most basic freedoms, reduced to a beast of burden. It was also the ignorance and superstition the indio was being shrouded with, denied education and the Spanish language, conscripted to obedience with threats of corporal and spiritual punishment. It was also the hypocrisy and warped values the indio was being regaled with, pomp and finery replacing honesty and decency, form and ritual replacing truth and justice. You can’t get more corrupt than that.

So it was then, so it is now. The corruption particularly during Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s time wasn’t just about the theft of money. It was about the theft of life, the kind of life Rizal envisioned. It was about the theft of freedom, the theft of knowledge, the theft of right and wrong. Government’s anti-corruption campaign can’t be just about punishing those who pillaged the country, it should be about punishing those who ravaged it.

Second off, Rizal didn’t just see the corruption, he fought it. He was a fighter. For which he paid the steepest price of all.

That should dispel that idiotic exhortation we keep hearing all the time about the need to become more “positive” or “constructive” or “forward-looking” by no longer railing against wrongdoers and wrongdoing, by simply doing the right thing. In fact you need both. You need to raze wrongdoing before you can build “right-doing” in its place. You need to fight lying, cheating and stealing before you can put freedom, truth and justice in their place.

You can’t have a more positive figure than Rizal. But you can’t have a more “negative” one as well than him, if by that is meant that he negated with every pore of his being and with every ounce of his genius the injustice and oppression of his time and place. He was a builder of dreams, but he was also a destroyer of nightmares. He was a doer, but he was also an “undoer.”

So it was then, so it is now. Government can’t just keep exhorting people to hew to the straight path, it has to show it’s the only path. The other ones lead only to perdition. The crooked ones lead only to punishment. You do wrong, you pay the price.

And finally, Rizal’s matuwid na daan was never the straight and narrow, it was always the straight and wide. Rizal was nothing if not a man of breathtaking vision and imagination. He saw more than his contemporaries. He did more than his contemporaries. Like George Bernard Shaw (he is the original author of the line, not JFK), Rizal might very well have said, “Some men see things as they are and say why, I dream of things that never were and say why not.”

In the end, Rizal didn’t just invent stories, he invented a people. Before him there were only indios, after Rizal there were Filipinos.

So it was then, so it is now. Or ought to be. Rizal’s heroism was about dreaming things that never were, doing things that hadn’t been done before. It was about striding boldly to build new worlds, not practicing abstemiousness and self-abnegation as hewing to the straight and narrow suggests. It’s a virtual command for a government that doesn’t just labor under Rizal’s shadow but under the shadow of the “impossible dream,” the dream dreamt by P-Noy’s own parents.

Taking the matuwid na daan can’t just mean making the theft of monies less possible, it can, and must, mean making the “impossible dream” of Edsa more possible. It can’t just mean making government a little more efficient, it can, and must, mean making People Power a lot more powerful. It can’t just mean that government ought to be more realistic, which is just seeing things that are and not even bothering to ask why, it must mean that government should be more idealistic, or start envisioning things that haven’t yet been and ask why not.

That is the only way history might record that before P-Noy there were only men, after P-Noy there were gods.