By Ivan Emil Labayne
www.nordis.net

When we welcomed 2020 in that pre-pandemic “year,” a friend quipped about how we’re closer now to the 60s of the 21^st century than that of the 20^th. We’re closer to a 60s where dusty and deliriously smoggy Manila could be submerged in water, when the effects of the climate crisis would have taken greater effect, closer to that uncertainly (still reversibly?) bleak scenario than to the 60s of student activism, the world’s radicalism from the barricades in Paris to the anti-colonial resistance in Algeria and many countries from Asia to South America. It was the social crises in pre-Martial Law Marcos 60s that largely spawned the First Quarter Storm and the Diliman Commune of the early 70s. While oil prices were busy on a barrage of hikes, the costs of just about everything subsequently soared as well, prompting the transformation of people’s understanding of their relationship to their society. In the case of UP Diliman, Michael Pante spoke of its transformation from a “center of colonial education” to a “center of national democratic activism.” That was just more than a year removed from the 60s—quite far but also not quite from this pressing present, where the McCarthyist 50s is being rehashed by the ntf-elcac, only with billions of funds, and little fear of being condemned. The Apollo landing of the 60s is now Elon Musk jet-setting to Mars, already preparing for a time when the earth has been fully extinguished, thanks in large part to the industrial, toxic wastes of musky capitalists like Elon, profiteers like Bezos besotted with redundant profit.

Closer to home, I dabble in quick math: if UP Baguio is celebrating its 60^th year this year, then it must have been founded in 1962, the 60s in its juvenilia, maybe more the demure and innocent than the daring, exploratory type. An educational foundling administratively under UP Diliman then, this small, pine-scenty, fog-heavy college in the summer capital* would then become the UP campus where I’ll enroll myself in during the first year of implementation of the infamous 300% Tuition Fee increase. It was called UP Baguio then, no longer, UPCB—UP College in Baguio—although I remember still seeing “UPCB” markers on the back of classroom chairs when I was a freshie.

(*Another sidenote, derived from Pante’s book on Quezon City’s short-lived status as the Philippine capital: along with 15 other sites, Baguio was one of the candidates to replace Manila as the national capital. Ipo-Novaliches, Quezon City-Novaliches, Baguio, Antipolo-Teresa, Nagcarlan-Lilio, and Tagaytay were the top six, accordingly graded based on five aspects: scenic resources, administration, public considerations, strategic considerations, and sanitation works. With an average of 69.4, Baguio was a close second, sandwiching Ipo-Novaliches City (71.5) and Quezon City-Novaliches (68.3), the two sites that will eventually be combined and chosen as the new capital.)

I already blogged about how my political education and awakening started and deepened in UP Baguio, mainly through Outcrop, its student publication. It was as a curious reader and a new recruit of Outcrop that I read this opinion piece, “So you think you’re lucky,” written by the publication’s Associate Editor, Albert Idia. It was that rather ‘harmless’ piece that served as my indirect, if not wondrous, initiation to the one basic fact/information—that the education of students from UP, as much as all state universities and colleges, are being funded by the people, hence the tag ‘Iskolar ng Bayan’—which would then undergird my commitment to Outcrop’s pro-student, pro-people politics and later on, an activism broadly practiced. It was during one of Outcrop’s EDs (educational discussions) when I first watched the documentary “Sa Ngalan ng Tubo,” again a key moment in stirring the limbs and loins of my political consciousness.

It was in UP Baguio in general, and in Outcrop in particular that I had a fuller appreciation of the significance of the cliches—if not reduced to words, then to the matter of “branding,” possibly hollowed #PeyupsPride, or to cutesy-angsty merchandises, lanyards and jackets and all: the need for students to be “critical,” vivifying the “Iskolar ng Bayan” phrase, which in turn combats as much as qualifies the false attribution that all UP students become activists.

To be “critical,” is not just about learning to put scare quotes in big words, or sprinkling one’s speech or writing with the occasional Adorno, or Foucault. In my years in up baguio, especially with my stint in Outcrop, through BMIs (basic masses integration), EDs and various programs on students’ and people’s issues, I learned about the dispossessions of farmers, the immiseration of all of us through non-living wages, guns in our heads, books being banned because thought is barred, a history of exploitation and a history of fighting back, biting facks, and fixing a system that’s been rigged.

Calendar-wise, the 2060s—apparition-like and apparently disastrous but also possibly more humane because protective of the commons—might be closer to us now than the 1960s but the latter’s spirit can never be fully exhausted, always ready to be resuscitated. After all, calendars and metrical time have not been dominant for all time, despite their seeming pervasiveness today. In The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende described “Clara’s childhood… [as] a world in which time was not marked by calendars or watches and objects had a life of their own, in which apparitions sat at the table…”

In your apparitions of burnout, a table of commemorations and celebrations, Christmas lightning and lighting rallies, quick as the fading of my digital memory. 60 years since the 60s, and with all our seeming lethargy and light-headedness, there’s the specter of something throbbing under our shirts and in between all our sweat and sunken faces: something crumbling in the face of a desperate order, something waiting to be built in the face of planetary destruction. # nordis.net