Paningkamot: New Approaches
I WAS IN FOURTH year high school when a teacher lent me a book entitled Six Young Filipino Martyrs by Asuncion David Maramba. It was a collection of short, gripping stories of young people who dared to dissent and paid for it with their lives. Of the six martyrs, only former Collegian editor-in-chief Ditto Sarmiento died a natural death — the others were all victims of extrajudicial killings. Eman Lacaba, who died at 27, was a literary prodigy. Bobby dela Paz, a doctor to the poor of Samar, was also 27 when he was killed. Lean Alejandro — the “thinker-activist” — was gunned down at 27. Laurie Barros, who graduated cum laude from UP, was killed when she was 28, and Edgar Jopson, who was named one of the country’s Ten Outstanding Young Men in 1970, died 19 days after his 34th birthday. The martyrs’ willingness to pour in their youth and their talents for their convictions won me over. I decided to study in UP, if only to get immersed in its culture of activism. During my first days in the University, however, I immediately saw that the UP of today is a wholly different place from the UP of the First Quarter Storm. The AS lobby, for instance, is now more often a venue for photo exhibits than a starting point of a march to Mendiola. The heyday of student activism in UP, it seems, has already passed.
SCIENTIA AT 30
EDITOR’S NOTE: Twenty years after The Task at Hand was published, for the third time in this issue, it has been brought up that College of Science students have earned a reputation for being apathetic. But in this piece by Scientia’s tenth Editor-in-Chief on record, the critic’s eye is turned not towards the students but to those who initiate the dissent and call for activism. Timbol says that students do not join rallies or boycotts out of apathy but of more substantial reasons like the antagonist character of some dissenters. Indeed, a great discussion in today’s activism is how to make students partake in deeper social issues, integrate with the basic masses and make them see the power of protests while maintaining the character of a fierce opposition, which it itself is antagonized by a conservative and bourgeois culture of anti-activism.
WRITTEN BY CARLO TIMBOL 2008-09 VOL 19 NO 1
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