Speech
of
His Excellency Fidel V. Ramos
President of the Philippines
On the commemoration of National Heroes’ Day

[Delivered at the Libingan ng mga Bayani, August 29, 1993]

A country created
by heroes

ON THIS solemn day set aside by law for honoring the heroes of the Filipino nation, it is fitting that we should hold these civic rituals among these simple tombs of our country’s heroes.

“Heroes have the whole earth for their tomb,” proclaimed Pericles, the Greek statesman, in his famous funeral oration for the Athenian dead in the Peloponnesian War 2,400 years ago. And this, of course, is true, because the qualities that made them extraordinary are qualities all of mankind honors, and seeks to emulate.

But the hero is not merely a creation of his own time. Quite the contrary: he is the forceful projection of his nation’s destiny and will.

A constellation of greatness

Its heroes define a nation’s quality—and we Filipinos can take pride in that we are citizens of a country created by heroes.

Before the political persecutions of 1872, there was no Filipino nation: We were a congeries of indios, mestizos and Creoles; Tagalogs, Pampangans, Ilocanos, Negrenses and Moros.

After the shedding of martyr’s blood by the priests Gom-bur-za, no further repression could prevent the Filipino nation from being born.

Rizal has been called—correctly—the “First Filipino” because he was first to conceive of all the peoples of the archipelago as one grand union transcending ethnicity, religion, language, custom—ang Sambayanang Pilipino.

What propitious confluence of stars and planets blessed us with the constellation of heroes that presided at our country’s birth?

Few other nations are so fortunate: Besides Rizal, we had Andrés Bonifacio, Marcelo and Gregorio del Pilar, Apolinario Mabini, López Jaena, Mariano Ponce, Emilio Jacinto, Antonio Luna, Aguinaldo. These heroes—together with thousands more: some of them lying on this lovely and quiet graveyard—are those whose memory we recall today.

We may not know the circumstances of their martyrdom. But we do know they did not shrink from the fire when their call to duty came. Some of their proper names we may not even know—as we do not know the name of the Filipino soldiers buried in unknown graves all over the archipelago.

We only know that when the country called, they came. And they have only one true name. Rizal spoke for all of them when he said: “Laong-Laan ang tunay kong ngalan . . .”

Every citizen can make a difference

The classical Greeks believed the citizen was educated and perfected by taking part fully in the life and affairs of his city-state. Participation in politics—in managing public affairs—was a right, a duty and an education for every citizen. Pericles noted that the Athenians regard the man who takes no part in public affairs not as one who minds his own business, but as good for nothing. The country’s business, as Athenians saw it, is every citizen’s business.

The best way to commemorate our country’s heroes is for every one of us to aspire to this same quality of civic responsibility. Every citizen can make a difference—and if we pull together we can all lift up the common life and raise our country to the dignity it deserves in the community of nations.

Today the tyrannies we struggle against are different from what they were in Rizal’s time, or even in the time of the Pacific War soldiers buried here. Today, poverty is the chief tyrant. In its various forms it oppresses more than half of all our people.

Our task today

For this new struggle we need new heroes—heroes who will not die for their country—but live for it. We need plain, everyday people who will respond to their civic consciences and take up their share of civic responsibility. And this is not as easy as it may seem. After all, to die for your country takes only one decision.

To live with civic responsibility means innumerable small decisions—to obey the law; to pay the right taxes; to take your vote seriously—and at every juncture to choose the public interest above our own.

We Filipinos have always found it easier to die for our country than to live for it. Times of peace and civil order we seem to fritter away in bickering. We split so easily into factions, each intent on its own petty agenda. We play at intrigue: each pursuing his or her self-interest, although doing so may be self-defeating.

This kind of antisocial behavior—so like the quarreling of crabs caught in a bamboo trap—cannot go on. We must find a way—in peacetime—to inspire among our people the kind of moral nobility that citizens show in times of revolution and of war.

If we Filipinos are to progress, citizenship must begin to count for more than ties of blood and kinship. We must begin to accept that national society is more than just an aggregation of individuals or families or clans.

The Philippine State has historically required extraordinarily little of its citizens. And, as individuals, we Filipinos acknowledge few obligations to the national community.

But this mutual indifference between State and citizen cannot go on. All of us who are determined to live out our lives in this country must now do all we can to make life in it a little more hopeful—for ourselves and for our children.

As Rizal foresaw a hundred years ago, the time has come to tell ourselves that if we wish to be saved, we must redeem ourselves.

Redeeming ourselves

And in this work of self-redemption we must “expend the whole light of our intellects, and all the fervor of our hearts.”

We have no more time to spare. Our generation can no longer pass the buck to some future Filipino generation. There is no one here but us. Who, if not us, shall set things right? Who, if not us, shall set the foundations for Philippine progress? Kung hindi tayo, sino pa?

This is the question we must ask ourselves as we stand here. This is the question we have to answer before history, before our heroes and before our children. This is the question you and I have to answer before our conscience and before God.

Let us pray we can answer it as selflessly as our heroes did—when Fate asked it of them.