The Janus face that looks ahead sees a slow-moving thick fog. Depending on your disposition, the roads beyond that bend on the craggy hill could be nightmarish or dreamy.
For a moment, I want to I look back further than 2020 and even past 2016, the bleak year that catapulted grotesque, megalomaniac presidencies.
I wish to take comfort on the phases in our lives when we, the babies after the second world war, formed our dreams and our images of ideal states.
Games Of Attrition
We saw not “peace time” but a Cold War that almost pushed the world into games of attrition.
With the specter of missiles and nuclear warheads, Americans made bomb shelters as part of their homes.
Thanks to the leadership and brinksmanship of two leaders, Nikita Khruschev of USSR and John F. Kennedy of the USA, the world escaped extinction.
The two men had contrasting styles. While one is remembered for furiously banging his shoe on a UN desk, the other is for banging, ahm, sex goddesses.
The latter inspired Americas in the space conquest, sending the first man on the moon, eclipsing the USSR’s canine wonder on a globular space ship.
Ours were the hippie years, where there were strange but beguiling vibrations in the air.
Imagine …
Today’s youth may view that seismic social movement as just long hair, drugs, and free love, when what it demanded was a new way to look at things, that could be summed up by saying “Imagine there’s no country”.
We had the Beatles to express our pains in teenage infatuation and, growing together, our awakening to the realities and demands of life.
As if orchestrated by a single command in the age when there was no social media, students – from Berkeley to UP – gathered by the hundreds to question the “establishment”.
We fought for the ideals. We believed we could change the world.
FQS and EDSA 1
Madame Mao, of course, had it wrong when her Red Guards burned books and sent China’s professors, artists, and thinkers to the clinkers, remote barrios, or death.
A number of drum beaters in my generation point to the First Quarter Storm as the touchstone of change in the Philippines, while some to the 1986 People Power.
These are two events almost twenty years apart that college students and millennials today do not even remember or know of and, much less, appreciate.
Focus On Sports
We had our rest periods.
We got insane over the intense local basketball rivalry between Crispa and Toyota (the men in short shorts).
Their games electrified the nation much more than any Ateneo-La Salle face-off, or Chicago versus the Pistons, or LeBron against the world.
We had boxing champ Elorde whose humility precluded ambitions of public office.
We also claim Muhammad Ali for his victory against discrimination.
Of Comics
The digital kids will never witness a Golden Age of Comics where Filipinos consumed komiks being spewed at 200 to 250 thousand copies per issue, swinging from eight to twenty titles per week!
The comics creators awed publishers and comics readers in the West who wondered how such a small and young country in Asia could have such a deep storytelling culture.
Of Flicks
This was true also in the movies.
We had our own Golden Age of Films when helmsmen like Lino Brocka, Ishmael Bernal, Mike de Leon, and Celso Ad Castillo made future classics.
Today, we are surrounded by bad shows.
There is a story of a new super power, voracious as usual, that even James Bond sequels will be terrified to touch. Drones will take the place of ICBMs.
Greatness Or Redemption
It is with great relief, though, that a reality show host masquerading as a president has been expunged.
I wonder how its twin movie here, with a mayor having overextended his kapasidad, will play out?
Yes, there are days when my mind looks for replays and hope that when I see the sequence of images, I’d be able to identify points where we, as a people, had those jump boards for greatness or redemption.