I wish I could be brave enough to like, just say it out loud and actually identify you. I guess you made the mistake of telling me your last name and your … rank. Nonexistent as it should be if my ballpark figuring of your age is any good.
Which, really, that’s where this angry letter starts. How, how can you be twice as old as I am and still be so goddamn stupid? Oh, I actually have answers to that question, but let me get this bit out of my system first. I mean. I’ll be 40 this year. I was born in the nearly last years of Martial Law. The 1986 People Power Revolution happens before I turn five, but the aftermath of both Martial Law and People Power go on for quite some time. (I wasn’t even ten when — trying to return to Metro Manila from Baguio, our family and our friends were stopped by armed soldiers at a checkpoint in Pampanga or somewhere like that. We couldn’t get back home. We were ordered to turn back to Baguio. There was a coup d’etat going on in the capital and soldiers were shooting each other in the streets. — Were you even there, you old idiot?)
If you’re twice as old as I am, then you lived in the Martial Law years. You were in the ranks in the Martial Law years. And I repeat. You’re still an old washed-up idiot now. Do you want to know why you are fucked in the head and an old clapped-out idiot? Because you wear t-shirts for that idiot liar and thief and asshole.
You lived through that idiot’s father’s regime. A regime that was proven to have murdered thousands of people, that was proven to have impoverished this entire goddamn nation for generations to come, that is still influencing this entire goddamn nation! You lived through all of that and you maybe know some of the things that had to have happened right in front of your thick fucking face! Then why, why, WHY THE FUCK, OLD MAN? What the hell do you stand to gain from more years of a dictatorship? What the hell do you think you’re doing, throwing your country back to the dogs — when you have a family and descendants who will suffer because of those same fucking dogs?
Oh, please, I know that the answers will fall into two broad-ish categories.
One: you didn’t know. You never saw the rot. You never saw the blood. You never saw the dead. Therefore you are innocent, and you can happily support the son of that dictator, because hey, the son’s different right? Wrong. I won’t go into all the reasons why you’re wrong, if this is why you’re wearing that fucking shirt. I won’t go into all the reasons because there are almost forty fucking years of research on the subject. Fucking educate yourself. Fucking talk to someone outside your fucking bubble of fucking geriatric shitheads, and fucking boomer juniors. Fucking know what kind of history and suffering has been going on out there, caused by that regime, and that will be caused by the same son that you support because guess what! That son wants to put that regime right back in power! He wants to be the asshole at the top this time! He thinks his parents had it good and he wants it all back, he thinks he’s entitled to it!
Two: and this is worse, I think, because two is, YOU FUCKING KNOW. You were there and you saw the evil and you didn’t do anything about it. Or you were there and you saw the evil and you were a fucking part of it. You were there, and you thought you were able to get your hands clean over the years, and then you put on that shirt and I know for certain that your hands will never ever be fucking clean. Again, I refuse to be the person who educates you on your bloodied hands. In this scenario: you know what you did. I refuse to know what you did. Whatever it is that you got out of that regime, out of that scenario, I hope you made the most of it. I hope you sleep well at night and I hope you can look your descendants in the eyes and tell them with all your heart that you are a good person, because I know the truth, and maybe I should just hope that they do, too, eventually. You’re not a good person. Not if you knew. Not if you knew and did nothing, and not if you knew and you were complicit.
And oh, by the way, how’s that working out for you? If you lived through those years. If you got something out of it. What are you doing in this apartment building? Where’s your spoils of your war against your own country? Where’s your trophies of your violence against your fellow citizens? How did you even get in here, damn. Why are you here in a middle-class apartment like me, when you got rich and fat off the blood of dead Filipinos? You love that old regime and you want it back — and you’re no more than a pauper to that son whose face you wear on your t-shirt. You’re no more than the mud on the soles of his shoes — which, hey, he don’t like mud and that must mean he don’t like you. Do you know that he hates you? That man is only ever looking for people to make fools out of. That man believes in a delusion and thanks to old fucking idiots like you the delusion goes on and gets stronger!
Boomers and the so-called Greatest Generation — the ones that are still doddering and hanging around — they’re out to kill us all, honestly. You’re one of them, mister next door neighbor. You want us all dead, and you also want to be the ones to tell us, gleefully, that it’s our own damn fault that we’re getting dead. Hell, I even think that you’re part of the reason we’re never getting out of this panini republic.
Sincerely, your pissed-off millennial neighbor.
starting over every time 