The Day A Republic Remembers, The Ideals A Nation Forget
It was incomprehensible. Simply incomprehensible.
The nation once again paused to honor a man who gave his life for truth and freedom—while those in power invoked his name with polished words that rang hollow against reality. On Rizal Day, speeches were delivered, values were recited, and legacy was praised. And yet, the gap between rhetoric and lived experience had never felt wider.
President Marcos spoke of integrity and accountability, pointing to Rizal’s life and martyrdom as moral guidance in a time when citizens were demanding answers from their leaders. He urged respect for truth, just reform, courage in word and deed. He called on public officials to place country over personal interest. He spoke of youth, of hope, of everyday acts of integrity, weaving Rizal’s ideals neatly into slogans of national renewal.
Meanwhile, Vice President Duterte, in her own address, echoed similar themes. Rizal’s struggle, she said, was not only against foreign domination but against abuse, division, and moral decay. True freedom, she declared, was the liberation of minds and hearts from corruption and disunity. She warned against the fading of wisdom and unity, and urged citizens to stand for truth and justice.
The words were flawless. The delivery, rehearsed. The symbolism, impeccable. Just like each year, as the nation paused to honor a man who gave his life for freedom—while continuing, day after day, to erode the very ideals he stood for. The contradiction was impossible to ignore. Ceremonies were held, speeches delivered, wreaths laid. And yet, the substance of what Rizal lived and died for was quietly set aside.
Rizal Day had become ritual without reckoning.
He had never written for applause. He had never spoken to be quoted once a year and forgotten. His words were meant to unsettle, to provoke thought, to demand moral discipline. Independence, as he understood it, was not a trophy to be displayed but a responsibility to be carried. A burden, heavy and unglamorous, that required vigilance and courage.
From his distance in history, the present would have looked disturbingly familiar. Truth diluted by convenience. Reason drowned out by noise. Loyalty demanded, but only when it was unthinking and uncritical. Those who questioned power were branded as threats, while those who stayed silent were praised as patriots.
And yet, it was precisely this kind of perfection that exposed the problem.
Because when leaders who preside over dysfunction, silence accountability, or benefit from entrenched power structures speak of integrity, it ceases to be homage and becomes performance. When calls for truth are issued from positions that thrive on selective memory and moral convenience, the language of Rizal is reduced to ornamentation. A script. A shield.
This was patriotism as theater—solemn, ceremonial, and safely disconnected from consequence.
Rizal did not die for slogans. He did not write so his name could be used to legitimize authority while the substance of his critique was ignored. His life was an indictment of corruption, of intellectual submission, of a people made docile by fear and comfort. To invoke him while presiding over systems that reward obedience and punish dissent is not reverence. It is appropriation.
The danger was not hypocrisy alone, but normalization. The steady conditioning of a public to accept symbolic morality in place of real reform. To applaud speeches about accountability while accountability itself remained elusive. To mistake commemoration for conscience.
This was the very condition Rizal warned against: a society corrupted not merely by tyrants, but by submission. By a willingness to accept appearances over truth. By a preference for ritual over reckoning.
Independence, as Rizal understood it, demanded clarity of thought and moral courage—especially from those who governed. It required leaders willing to be judged by the standards they proclaimed. Without that, the language of freedom became empty, and patriotism devolved into sheer performativism in an age of corruption and subservience.
Thus, Rizal Day stood exposed—not as a triumph, but as a test repeatedly failed.
To honor Rizal was never about quoting his virtues. It was about embodying them, especially when inconvenient. Especially when power was at stake. Anything less was not remembrance.
It was spectacle.