Reaffirming a Quixotic Ideal
A message for Rizal Day
Well, ever since people celebrated his martyrdom at Bagumbayan in 1896, Jose Rizal has represented a race willing to assert dreams and aspirations of his own land and race.
These dreams and aspirations, mostly in a form of writeups and discoveries of his own work, has showed how the Filipino as capable of enjoying its own self-government, what more of its own independence, in order to enjoy its hard work, of uniting material and spiritual wealth to create a healthy well-being, both the individual as well as its own society.
However, Jose Rizal was and is, more than a person; like all others who proved how great the Philippines is, is one of those who represented the quixotic ideal of the Filipino people. Rizal loved the Filipino nation more than his life. Rizal loved the independence of the Philippines more than his own independence, and with His death on the altar of freedom at Bagumbayan comes the dream and hope and warm beating of his heart shared by such other heroes as Gregorio H. del Pilar, Malvar, Mabini, and others.
However, despite years passed, of gaining independence, of facing tyrants, and enduring decades old hardships, Rizal's ideal remains quixotic as long as those who afforded to babble his ideas, aspirations, even his example, are in fact same as the corrupt friars and opportunistic men of the cloth during his period.
And regardless of having known for his contributions, be it in the field of medicine, science, engineering, literature, his life's work remains unfinished, and its up to the Filipino people to take that arduous, decades-old task.
And that task is more than what the system has stubbornly insisted. Not also wonder that out of patriotism and social awareness, there are those willing to set fires against an existing yet dilapidated social order. True that the country needs a long term process of reform, renewal, revolution. Rizal's dream to realise an aspiration comes a reaffirmation and assertion of a nation longing to stand up on its own feet, willing to confront the enemies and slanderers of one's homeland.
Anyways, there may be people who treats Rizal as a person worthy of veneration; however, not all appreciates his word, such as having a nation that shelters the despot or the slave.