I Don’t Want to Be Like Cory
3 August 200903 August 2009 – I was turning 11 years old when the snap elections and subsequent People Power happened, and my childhood recollections include a kind of rivalry between my father, who worked with the Cojuangcos, and my mother, who was a government employee, and me thinking that either way it goes, my family would be fine.
But I think I may have been more yellow than red back then, seeing as how I loved to sing Handog ng Pilipino sa Mundo and that song Virna Lisa (whatever happened to her?) sang, the title of which eludes me now.
Some 23 years or so later, and with a bit more sense of politics and history, I realized I truly was more yellow than red after all, considering the buckets of tears I shed when Tati woke me up at 6 in the morning last Saturday to tell me that “she’s gone.” I had been saying for weeks that I would bawl like a child when she dies; an event, which many, even her family, had begun to expect in the past weeks.
Tita Cory was a very big part of my political awakening, I guess you could say. And because of that, I wouldn’t want to be like her.
I wouldn’t want to have to sacrifice the love and life of my husband for the sake of this country’s freedom. It would be asking too much of me to have to take care of an incarcerated husband, smuggling messages in and out, organizing a campaign all by myself so that he would continue to fight his political battles.
Nor would I want to spend an hour of my life forsaking my family, my daughter, for the nation. I refuse to give up six years of my child’s life just because I have been chosen by millions of Filipinos to be their stalwart of freedom, their beacon of democracy. Taking care of the government must have meant having to delegate the care of children to someone else. NO.
I would like to think that I am a good citizen. Let me pay my taxes, make me follow the law.
But do not make me give up my family.
And because you did, Tita Cory, even for just those six years of your life, I thank you.
