Being young

One leaves one’s hometown to be educated and be ready for the real world or the big city where one works eventually. For today’s youth, it even means any of the big cities of the world. One returns to one’s hometown either a success or a failure, depending on one’s or society’s definition of these words.

For the young of a not so distant past, youth meant idealism in changing the status quo and to a great extent, we owe much of the freedom we now enjoy to them. Today’s young is privileged for not having been born during war times or despotic regimes when being young meant fighting the establishment or a foreign power.

One leaves one’s hometown to join the struggle and to return with an amputated spirit. As Al Pacino said in Scent of a Woman, "there’s no prosthetic for that." One returns home with dreams nipped in the bud, idealism demolished after a bout with society’s inequities. And in the end, becoming not so different from the enemy one wished to vanquish. Violence is not only during war but also even at deceptively peaceful yet suppressive times.

I left the mainstream years ago for an alternative subculture and returned eventually when the subculture would no longer hold. Then I again tried to find my niche in the very society I wished to change. Occasionally, one’s beliefs are validated and you feel that you are being patted in the back, as when the first Senate after Marcos’ ouster, repudiated a treaty that would have extended the US bases’ stay in the country.

One adjusts to a society far from what one envisioned during years of struggle. The diaspora has gotten even worse now with hospitals running out of health workers. As in far worse times, those who leave the country are considered heroes even if they leave hospitals and other industries in dire need of staff. But who can blame them? Ironically, it’s when one leaves that one can practically help kin and friends. It would be better if we export products instead of workforce. But one can’t wish for too much.

I’m a product of my time. I wish I were not as socially determined, but I am.

I don’t typify the success I must have promised to be years ago. But one sees some truths that not anybody who had not joined the struggle can quite see, if that’s any consolation.

One’s face now bear the lines and marks of years of searching for life’s intangibles in a time of peace, when one was used to living in danger and fear during a not-so- peaceful past (which paradoxically used to define one’s constructed frame of reference.)

I returned to my hometown years ago, to family and friends to lick some wounds before I again set out to find my niche in the world – an adolescent of turbulent times and an adult in peacetime.

I cannot quite imagine the troubles I must have brought upon my parents for not having tread the paved road of life and instead, explored an uncharted path.

Parents suffer from the daring exploits of their kids, which now as a parent I can quite relate with. It must have been terrifying for my parents to see me risk everything when they very much wanted to protect me.

It must had been just as terrible for a parent like Don Jacinto Velez y Roa, gobernadorcillo of the gremio de mestizos, and father of Marcial Velez, after whom the street is named, to be arrested by the Americans and imprisoned at Fort San Pedro because of his son’s involvement in the revolution.

(Marcial with General Mateo Luga,and Pantaleon del Rosario fought the Americans when many of their contemporaries had long surrendered and capitulated. He surrendered in Leyte eventually in 1902. He remained active in the city’s politics and even in the nation’s quest for independence after that through peaceful means. He never married but sired three children.)

In peacetime, one returns to the mainstream, plant the fields, love and bring kids to the world. Guns are made into ploughshares. Then in the far distant future, somebody’s kid will again find a cause to fight and leave the beaten path and scare the wits out of their parents. Years later he would return to be among his or her people as either a success or failure, depending on how one defines those words. He will come back to plant the fields, love and bring kids to the world…..