to review for a final exam is boring.
in lieu of reading a whole lot of words regarding our national hero, here i am now, typing them instead. a lot has been said about what he said, a lot has been done since what he has done himself, so frankly i don't think anything substantial would be bound to come out of this post of mine.
the only thing that would matter this time would be my opinion, for this is my personal space.
as of this time, maybe there would also be other people who are bound to study more about our national hero. not that their school requires them to, or that a certain subject of theirs needs a little backgrounder about Rizal, but because they want to. after all, it takes a lot of things to be tagged with the alias "the pride of the Malayan race" or "the greatest Malayan who ever lived.". from food to fencing, from education to engineering, from ladies to linguistics, Rizal has took them on and has excelled at them with immense style and ease. he was, as i would like to call him, an academic machine. a tank with perpetual motion, able to operate at dizzying speeds and accomplish a whole lot in a very short amount of time. to calculate his efficiency would be something of a beauty. no movement wasted, nothing taken for granted.
calm, cool and smart. not your typical nerd. he could lay down his fists as if it were the law if he wanted to. he was the school valedictorian with the bully's strength. he was the doctorate holder who had a jiu-jitsu black belt. he may be, in our time, the Nobel Prize laureate, Olympic Gold medalist and UFC lightweight champion all at the same time. he was THAT good. and he was a Filipino.
but apart from all the accolades (including the 22 languages he speaks fluently), he was first and foremost a nationalist. a reformist who wanted equality practiced in his homeland between his people and their conquerors.
he whom wrote two blockbuster novels which depicted scenes of society delivered with his own critical commentary in the form of his lead character. part historian and part sociologist, our national hero gave us a 3rd person perspective of what the Filipino has endured during the arduous and taxing reign of the Spaniard. noting that not only was thorough critique given but also comprehensiveness not being compromised unlike in other history books written today.
Joe was THAT good. his teachings are timeless. his writings have a certain prophetic ring to it. fanatics to him claim that he is a godsend. a reincarnation of Jesus Christ. yet the mere fact that his writings about society which were published more or less 300 years ago are still applicable today indicate a sad truth: we still have not progressed as a nation.
backward, neo-colonial and marginalized. this is who we are. and unless a conscious effort is given to make sure that our national hero's works are to be rendered ineffective in today's world, we would still be stuck in where we are. still a conquered and beleaguered people whom owe their identity to foreign powers in control. the only things which are different in today's society is the fact that we are being controlled in more subtle and psychological ways. our patronization of the english language is one. sabihin nyo nagsusulat ako ngayon sa ingles. oo nagsusulat ako para yung mga nagfifeeling na magaling dyan at nakakaintindi ng ingles (kuno) e basahin yung blog ko. para mamulatan naman sila. para di sila tawaging tanga at ignorante.
if what Rizal wrote a couple of hundred years ago still holds true today, then we have a lot of work to do. if what we see in his writings still reflect in our society today, then we can say that we still live in the Spanish era. Filipinos still being a minority in their own land. peddling what remains of their "culture" to tourists who feel that they immerse themselves in deeply rooted cultural activities. in a world where everything is sourced to maximize profits and gains, nobody has yet taken that step backward to see if we have moved even a little bit as our national hero envisions us to, or there are a lot already, such as the Constantinos, but their influence is heavily limited to those who have access to the vast syntheses they have made for Philippine historiography. our national hero's writings are preserved for a lot of reasons, one to for us to appreciate his vision for a better nation, and another to be a guide or a point of comparison for us to know if we have indeed made strides forward towards national development. if we still see ourselves in the picture Rizal has painted in his works, then what we have done is inadequate.
there is more work to be done. and there can never be too many hands to do the dirty work.
if we fight a mirror image of ourselves, all we have to do then is to break the surrounding glass.
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