The distance between the past and the present

I was in a time machine during the last many days, suddenly thrown back to the late 70s in particular. The dark days of martial law in the Philippines and how by some unexplainable circumstance I found myself assuming a very challenging but dangerous work as foreign correspondent for the Hongkong-based news weekly magazine Far Eastern Economic Review or FEER, a highly respected regional publication with unquestionable credibility in the media world.

Before being thrown into a new arena of struggle, I was dreaming of a foreign posting as foreign trade specialist in the Dept. of Trade, a position I fought hard and won hard via the usual examinations. But then, there was a hurdle to pass and it was getting the approval of the National Intelligence Authority or NISA, a powerful body with all the arsenal of Russia's KGB. As I have been a rebel student leader and therefore a "possible" subversive, that NISA blessing never came. On the other hand, I found myself in jail shortly after martial law was imposed. I didn't stay that long as a political detainee, but all those responsible for arresting me met horrible deaths within a period of a year.

Being a journalist during the long period of Marcos authoritarian rule was not just challenging and risky. There was a strong sense of purpose in digging for the truth, especially the abuses of the military in the countryside that were safely kept in convents and churches. Media gave much to the world without the sophistication of later day technologies such as the Google and other search engines that make life comfortable without leaving one's abode.

That the world was informed of the happenings in most parts of the world, and that many governments were dysfunctional and oppressive to its own, were tasks tackled with great dedication by people of the press.

What threw me back to this period were all the materials that came out of my storage rooms as I struggled to separate the meaningful from the meaningless collection of documents and personal mementos of the past. The separation process had been slow and tortuous because I could not find the measure of the past from the present. All of a sudden, the past became the present.

It is a philosophical question to ask if there is a distance between the past and the present and whether the past has its own force to return to the present and by what circumstance is totally unexpected.#