Once upon a time, there was a storm that swept Metro Manila, resulting in a handful of deaths, hundreds of injuries, and a plethora of burnt buses, torn flags, and scattered fragments of police grenades and home-made pillbox bombs.
For those old enough to remember, that was the First Quarter Storm of 1970, which, to this day, is the biggest sustained protest of students in the nation’s capital.
No succeeding student protests have matched the intensity of the Storm. Not even a jampacked Ateneo-La Salle game, a sold-out Katy Perry concert, a KathNiel fan day, or even the Million People March of 2013 surpassed the number of youth who mobilized in those three tumultuous months of 1970—a time when being an activist was the in thing among young people.
Those were the days—the days of disquiet, nights of rage against a brewing dictatorship, against an anti-poor government mired in debt and corruption, which basically is the same social condition as today.
The Storm was symbolized not by the image of a cyclone, or by huge waves of a storm surge, but with a raised, clenched, left fist. That has always been the symbol of resistance, the emblem of collective disgust against a rotten system.
For UAAP Season 78, host University of the Philippines (UP) changed its official varsity logo from the iconic Oblation to the radical clenched fist. Coupled with Season 78’s slogan, “Tumitindig, sumusulong!” (“Standing up, moving forward!”), UP reminds the followers of the country’s biggest collegiate league of its gloried past of radical activism. That UP was not only a player in the Storm—it was the host of the Storm.
However, the Maroons’ new logo and slogan come at a time when its own community seems to have moved on from a distant past. UP is now known not as the bastion of activism but the school for privileged intellectuals, with its dear tuition of P1,500 per unit. Not only that, student mobilizations have dwindled and unjust campus policies have been implemented. Facilities and parcels of land have been leased to or subsidized by corporate investors, in effect making the Philippines’ national university a semi-private one. Recently, we have seen poor students deprived of dormitories. We have also seen the rise of student leaders who espouse neo-liberal policies of capitalism and no longer the leftist types like the late Lean Alejandro. The balance of forces in UP has tilted to the right, and the remaining remnants of the left are mere spent forces whose ideological interpretations are mere reaffirmations of antiquated texts.
Hence, the Maroons’ new logo and slogan are mere radical chic, the same way faces of Che Guevarra or Guy Fawkes, or the hammer-and-sickle emblem of communists are worn on shirts as fashion statements of counter-culture during rock concerts. In this era of digitized apathy when the youth are looking for career opportunities rather than social change, the rise of radicalism in UP still will bear watching.
In any case, the revolution will stand up and move forward with or without UP.
The opinion expressed here are of the author’s alone and does not necessarily represent the stand of Fullcourtfresh.com
