DAYS BEFORE we could even hear President Noynoy's State-of-the-Nation Address (SONA) on July 26, 2010, we already know it to be potentially very historic. That is, it holds the potential of being a real historic turning point for Filipinos to usher in a new chapter in our history toward the end of the half-millennium after we became part of Western consciousness, after we became targets and victims of Western greed. The potential for significant page-turning change can only be verified and fulfilled if real social change will indeed follow in its heels.  Otherwise it will only be worth remembering as a dramatic turn of events that effected a changing of the guards in the corridors of power in these sun-blest islands between the world's widest landmass and its widest sea.

Benigno Simon C. Aquino III represents a genetic and consciousness lineage from players in two distinct periods not so far back in our collective past. 

The first of these periods was that of the 14-year struggle of the people across the entire archipelago against the dictatorial rule of a native despot who was mandated by indirect-colonial and native-elite interests. (Yes, that struggle was 14 years long, not only three years, much less the four days that many of us remember from the brevity of personal active involvement.)  He was sired by the widely-acknowledged hero of that struggle, a hero who lived in the shadows of prison bars and the barbed wire of solitary confinement for years without due process, who decided to return to take a more active role in that struggle but got a bullet through his head to reward his having taken that risk. 

Little Noynoy had to grow up partaking of his father's forced-separation agonies, and many other sacrifices, besides. Much like Jose Rizal's execution at Bagumbayan almost a century before, many of our people remember Ninoy Aquino's martyrdom at the hands of assassins at the international airport's tarmac, the least painful and definitely most final of the long string of his sacrifices in that period. 

Like his many sisters, Noynoy had suckled at the breasts of a strong-willed woman who had spiritually stood by the side of Benigno Jr. as the latter fought his political battles. She reared the boy's character to be strong-willed to stick to the straight and narrow path of rectitude, and in word and deed she showed him and the multitudes the courageous ethics of honorable governance, albeit without a clear comprehension of the motives and machinations of the American powerful policy-makers who had convincingly pretended to be on the side of the real long-term interests of the Filipino nation. 

Like his mother, who had led and symbolized the post-Marcos period of dismantling the dictatorship in the second one of the two periods, Noynoy has not shown any measure of consciousness of our continuing colonization. All blame has been heaped upon the factor of corruption,not unlike the Spanish colonialists' ranting about the supposed "indolence of the Filipino,"completely exonerating the colonization factor from our people's behavior.

For this country's presidency, Benigno III campaigned and won on a platform of change, of the elimination of over-demonized corruption, and he is now asking us, the people, to make such change a reality, with us as his collective boss and with him as our servant-leader.  The electorate apparently believed his promise to be real and sincere, and voted for him. After the elections many people were euphoric over prospects that his victory may have already foreshadowed real change. For one thing, the Filipino voters proved that we could overcome our long-term defeatism that had repeatedly paralysed us to inaction. Such sense of defeatism has confronted our campaign for "balik-bayanihan," our recent calls for the popular revival of the "bayanihan" way of life among Filipinos beyond circumstances of calamity and of dramatic disasters and emergencies.

Self-fulfilling defeatism has been our national enemy and the people have shown we can muster the determination and overcome it. Well and good. The people heeded Aquino's call for support; but will the majority now follow his lead and finally make change a historical reality as early as the rest of his administration's first 100 days and the next few years?  Are we, Filipinos, ready to effect the real social change that we collectively want , that we collectively need, that we have reason to demand? Indeed we have reason to demand this of ourselves much more than to demand this of President Noynoy or of "P-Noy"!

We, the People, can and will create the history of real change only if we really understand deeply the past history behind the dreaded status quo. Beyond knowing some of the details, do the people have the sense of history to understand how past developments built the Trapo political empire and to understand what future developments are required for it to crumble, and be defeated for good?

This year's SONA will set official baselines that will certainly be compared with the very last SONA Aqyuno will deliver much later. Will there be real change to be created and enjoyed by the people between those SONAs? Or will the people, still confused about our history, simply ignore and squander all items of opportunity, and go about their "business as usual" and refuse to work as one as active stakeholders and, instead, simply remain as just a big bunch of complainers and finger-pointers about the deep and long-drawn problems we still unabashedly refuse to lift a finger to try to solve?  Past disappointments have grown to be buttresses of defeatism, excuses for self-fulfilling prophecies of futility, excuses for the fulfillment of the "wise" predisposition to be conveniently passive all the way to more failure. The most tenacious and determined advocates of real social changed are jeered as the most "naive," and the most cynical and pessimistic boasting their supposed "wisdom" and "maturity."

(Claiming to be willing to go into violent actions, or actually raising voices to call for such actions, is not at all the same as the needed meticulously planned day-to-day action for comprehensive real change! Such claims can only prove an acute level of discontent and impetuosity, but does not even hint at anything about actually solving those festering social maladies.

Mainstreaming a widescale earnest discourse on the 15 empowering paradigm shifts raised by Lambat-Liwanag can effectively deny the dominant disempowering social paradigms the public acquiesence and support that maintain them and the current ruling system that thrives on the unthinking public support. And the people would need to have a keen sense of history to chart the collective course we want to have. 

That is precisely the sense of history that would be useful, unlike what most previous and current History books would have us memorize. This is what we ought to have as an urgent imperative for Filipinos. 

This book aims to help popularize a sense of history that would enable us to grasp and comprehend historical developments, sans the petty trivia, and to create a history that our children and our children's children would rightly appreciate as part of our heritage and patrimony. 

The contents of President Noynoy's SONA this Monday, as well as precisely this article, bear reading again every single year in the coming years. Such re-reading can tell us clearly if, finally, Filipinos shall have built our will power to chart our own historical course for a desirable collective future. Or, quite expectedly, we may discover that we have become too afraid of still another failure and still another disappointment to even try.  

Prof. Ed Aurelio C. Reyes

Subic, Zambales

July 17, 2010