Two roads.
It is not easy to love you, Jose Rizal.
It is far easier to love our fellowmen-because we can reach out to them, because they never seem as impenetrable and as unchanging as you are. You are, after all, the eerie Renaissance man. Doctor, sculptor, educator, propagandist-the list goes on with you. Even if you probably aren’t perfect, you seem the very figure of perfection, the epitome of that oft-used phrase, “small but terrible,” while the rest of us, in your presence, might just feel small and terrible. Your actions have been documented, and dissected to the point that-and I hazard a guess here-had you lived in our time, someone would have probably called you the first Filipino on Facebook. Or the first Filipino on Twitter. Or even the first Filipino to text. You are an extraordinary man, but as we try to move towards our own extraordinary selves, it feels rather difficult to look up and see looming the shadows of a metaphorical giant. It feels like a grave burden.
It is easier to be in awe, to hold you up as a paragon of all that is good and just. It is easier to build statues to show our admiration and respect. It is easier to make laws, or to put you in money. It is easier to blow you up from that five-foot-or-something stature instead of discussing you as you are, which is one of us-it is that ‘us’, and what it means, which I guess we have trouble with.
It is not easy to love your country, Jose Rizal.
I don’t think you’ve ever been run over by a kalesa before, but here people are getting run over by their own countrymen. I mean that both ways. Just recently, someone important to my friends passed away because of an accident, an accident rooted in a disregard for the rules. You’ve probably heard of this before, and you might call this an enduring problem, one we continue to struggle to solve, but while we are independent and free, we are trapped in the shackles of poverty, of corruption, of the lack of equality, of the lack of basic human decency. It is very difficult to believe in goodness when people so willingly shove in an effort to get a ride, or when people steal, so blatantly, in front of everyone else. It is very difficult to love a country that struggles to feed its children, one that struggles to send them to school. It feels like an imposition, one borne out of being born here.
I had to be taught to love you-I was fortunate enough to go to a school where people respect you enough to discuss you like I would talk about a friend. You weren’t perfect, but you were brilliant, and at that place, I was shown it all-your thoughts, your actions, your deeds, your faults, every single thing that makes one human. I was shown it all, and slowly I began to understand.
But ultimately I learned to love you because of someone I loved, myself. You should know that you generate such feverish devotion, such a constant thrill, that when someone I loved was passionate about you, I went out of my way to finally learn more about you, to see why people had such feelings for you-feelings other than awe and respect, denominations given freely to such educated men.
It was selfish, I know, like buying a car, or new clothes, to impress. I was supposed to know better-I should not have been that shallow. But all of us do crazy things for love, and apparently, to love someone is to love the people they love themselves. So I had to learn to love you.
I learned that you took pleasure in reading, in simple meals, in the comforts of a small town, and in the bright lights of a big city. And the more I read about you, and re-read about you, the more I realized that in some ways, we were alike.
The statue awakens, and the man is alive.
Whether it was love or it was a newfound vigor, I might never know, but slowly I started to want to know more about my country. I wanted to learn about the past, to understand the present. I wanted to understand the present, to guide my future. I went out of my way to learn more about you, and when the time came to spend a semester of nothing else but your name, I tried to grab as much of an opportunity as I could. And suddenly, suddenly your country was a beautiful place, the site of a billion treasures-the same country I had vowed to leave, over and over again, as I’d seen many do. As I’d seen you do. (But perhaps, erasing the option of ever coming back.) The same country I had complained over and over about, the same people I’d relegated to the dust of a possible departure, now they were my country, my people.
I loved you and I loved my country the same way I’d loved someone, but with the bittersweet ending to that love I started to wonder if I was shallow after all, and that I’d cease loving you and my country, myself.
And so we come to this fork in a road.
I can choose, like many, to throw away all that their loves had loved, for an opportunity to forget, and to start anew, and there with the letters and the music, you can lie-you and your country. It would not be new to leave you, and it would not be difficult to find reasons to.
Or I could choose to love my country the way I had always loved people, steadfastly. In the knowledge of thoughts and actions, praises and faults. I could love my country because I now know you, and I now understand you. That I could leave if in my heart to the Philippines I will always return. That I could criticize if I promise to stand tall and work with others for a solution.
I could love my country not as a singular heart belonging to a 'one', but as a plethora, of hearts I ought to protect, of minds I ought to help mold-which perhaps, was what you wanted all along.
And because it is a milestone of a birthday, perhaps, this time, I should give to you, as you would want, without thinking about the cost. I know that I may not be alone, that I may have started too late, but as I learned from you-better to face your fate, your reality, even at the last minute, than never to look it in the eye at all. I might not change everything, but from this day on, I will try with all my might.
Then maybe, someday, if I can be even half as good as you are, then we can all stand shoulder to shoulder with you, like giants. Until then, I will keep my hope, and your faith, and work for my future.
Happy birthday, Jose Rizal.
It is far easier to love our fellowmen-because we can reach out to them, because they never seem as impenetrable and as unchanging as you are. You are, after all, the eerie Renaissance man. Doctor, sculptor, educator, propagandist-the list goes on with you. Even if you probably aren’t perfect, you seem the very figure of perfection, the epitome of that oft-used phrase, “small but terrible,” while the rest of us, in your presence, might just feel small and terrible. Your actions have been documented, and dissected to the point that-and I hazard a guess here-had you lived in our time, someone would have probably called you the first Filipino on Facebook. Or the first Filipino on Twitter. Or even the first Filipino to text. You are an extraordinary man, but as we try to move towards our own extraordinary selves, it feels rather difficult to look up and see looming the shadows of a metaphorical giant. It feels like a grave burden.
It is easier to be in awe, to hold you up as a paragon of all that is good and just. It is easier to build statues to show our admiration and respect. It is easier to make laws, or to put you in money. It is easier to blow you up from that five-foot-or-something stature instead of discussing you as you are, which is one of us-it is that ‘us’, and what it means, which I guess we have trouble with.
It is not easy to love your country, Jose Rizal.
I don’t think you’ve ever been run over by a kalesa before, but here people are getting run over by their own countrymen. I mean that both ways. Just recently, someone important to my friends passed away because of an accident, an accident rooted in a disregard for the rules. You’ve probably heard of this before, and you might call this an enduring problem, one we continue to struggle to solve, but while we are independent and free, we are trapped in the shackles of poverty, of corruption, of the lack of equality, of the lack of basic human decency. It is very difficult to believe in goodness when people so willingly shove in an effort to get a ride, or when people steal, so blatantly, in front of everyone else. It is very difficult to love a country that struggles to feed its children, one that struggles to send them to school. It feels like an imposition, one borne out of being born here.
I had to be taught to love you-I was fortunate enough to go to a school where people respect you enough to discuss you like I would talk about a friend. You weren’t perfect, but you were brilliant, and at that place, I was shown it all-your thoughts, your actions, your deeds, your faults, every single thing that makes one human. I was shown it all, and slowly I began to understand.
But ultimately I learned to love you because of someone I loved, myself. You should know that you generate such feverish devotion, such a constant thrill, that when someone I loved was passionate about you, I went out of my way to finally learn more about you, to see why people had such feelings for you-feelings other than awe and respect, denominations given freely to such educated men.
It was selfish, I know, like buying a car, or new clothes, to impress. I was supposed to know better-I should not have been that shallow. But all of us do crazy things for love, and apparently, to love someone is to love the people they love themselves. So I had to learn to love you.
I learned that you took pleasure in reading, in simple meals, in the comforts of a small town, and in the bright lights of a big city. And the more I read about you, and re-read about you, the more I realized that in some ways, we were alike.
The statue awakens, and the man is alive.
Whether it was love or it was a newfound vigor, I might never know, but slowly I started to want to know more about my country. I wanted to learn about the past, to understand the present. I wanted to understand the present, to guide my future. I went out of my way to learn more about you, and when the time came to spend a semester of nothing else but your name, I tried to grab as much of an opportunity as I could. And suddenly, suddenly your country was a beautiful place, the site of a billion treasures-the same country I had vowed to leave, over and over again, as I’d seen many do. As I’d seen you do. (But perhaps, erasing the option of ever coming back.) The same country I had complained over and over about, the same people I’d relegated to the dust of a possible departure, now they were my country, my people.
I loved you and I loved my country the same way I’d loved someone, but with the bittersweet ending to that love I started to wonder if I was shallow after all, and that I’d cease loving you and my country, myself.
And so we come to this fork in a road.
I can choose, like many, to throw away all that their loves had loved, for an opportunity to forget, and to start anew, and there with the letters and the music, you can lie-you and your country. It would not be new to leave you, and it would not be difficult to find reasons to.
Or I could choose to love my country the way I had always loved people, steadfastly. In the knowledge of thoughts and actions, praises and faults. I could love my country because I now know you, and I now understand you. That I could leave if in my heart to the Philippines I will always return. That I could criticize if I promise to stand tall and work with others for a solution.
I could love my country not as a singular heart belonging to a 'one', but as a plethora, of hearts I ought to protect, of minds I ought to help mold-which perhaps, was what you wanted all along.
And because it is a milestone of a birthday, perhaps, this time, I should give to you, as you would want, without thinking about the cost. I know that I may not be alone, that I may have started too late, but as I learned from you-better to face your fate, your reality, even at the last minute, than never to look it in the eye at all. I might not change everything, but from this day on, I will try with all my might.
Then maybe, someday, if I can be even half as good as you are, then we can all stand shoulder to shoulder with you, like giants. Until then, I will keep my hope, and your faith, and work for my future.
Happy birthday, Jose Rizal.