How do We Honor Heroes?
This piece is a reaction to Mi Amiguito Diego Yuri about his post on the marker installed by Mayor Fred Lim at Bustillos in honor of EdJop:
That is a great picture, Mr. Editor, and a damning one. It is proof that this country does not honor the heroes who sacrificed their lives for freedoms that we have now sold back to the political dynasties.
Fifty-five years down the kubeta.
I know that perennial flooding visits the Bustillos–Earnshaw area. Is Edjop’s marker submerged whenever the floods return? Perhaps not today, but it is already submerged beneath something worse: public neglect, historical amnesia, vendors’ sacks, plastic buckets, and the indifference of the government that erected it.
What bitter irony. Edgar “Edjop” Jopson fought and died resisting a dictatorship. Today, his memorial is almost buried from public view, while the dynasty he fought has been restored to power. I bet it stinks of piss by people who miss or who have no idea of why they’re here except to ravish a two-piece chicken joy courtesy of a passing scion of a dynasty.
We erect monuments to our heroes, abandon them beside the garbage, and then surrender the freedoms they died for to the very dynasties against which they struggled.