FLOWERING OF THOUGHT: The price of yellow

The current Malacañang occupant has made the word “dilawan” (the yellows, from “dilaw,” Tagalog for yellow), a catch-all phrase to describe those who do not share the administration’s views. At one point, so-called yellow groups under this administration have been described as being in cahoots with the reds (referring to the leftists), in a plot to topple the government. But yellow, admittedly one of the colors of the Liberal Party (LP) brand (the others being red, blue, and white), and much impugned by supporters of the present government has a rich, noble history. The story goes back to the song “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree,” an international number one hit in 1973 by The Dawn featuring Tony Orlando. Most people understand the song to be a former convict’s love note to his girl, asking her to tie a yellow ribbon around an old oak tree to signal that she still wanted him. One of the song’s writers, however, has made a clarification. L. Russell Brown has stated that he picked up inspiration for the piece from Reader’s Digest, where a story had been printed about a former prisoner of war’s impending homecoming following the United States’ Civil War. She was to tie a handkerchief around the oak tree outside town to signify her continuing love for the guy. Brown told his songwriting partner Irwin Lavine about the story. They decided to compose a song out of it, but replaced the handkerchief with a ribbon. As anyone who is familiar with the song knows, the girl in the story did not just leave one, she tied “a hundred yellow ribbons (handkerchiefs) round the ole oak tree.” When the late senator Benigno Aquino Jr. (Ninoy) returned from self-imposed exile in the United States in 1983, supporters tied yellow ribbons along the supposed route of his trip from the Manila International Airport to the Aquino residence in Quezon City. He never got to see the ribbons. He was shot to death soon after landing. Yellow became the Philippine color of resistance to oppression. It was a color used by the movements awakened by his martyrdom into involvement in the struggles against the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. It was the color of most dresses worn by Aquino’s widow, Corazon (Cory), during her campaign against Marcos for the snap presidential elections of 1986. It was the color of the confetti strewn on pro-democracy protesters by supporters in Manila’s financial district. It was the color donned by millions of Filipinos who asserted President Corazon Aquino’s victory and clamored for the ouster of Marcos during the 1986 Edsa People Power revolution. Sadly, enemies of Ninoy and Cory and of their son, former president Benigno Simeon Aquino III, who always wore a yellow ribbon have managed to reduce yellow to a despicable symbol of the foibles of his term. Worse, leaders have recently made the strangest contortions to distance themselves from yellow, for political expediency, to try to get past the association of yellow with nothing but the LP. Vice President Maria Leonor Robredo, in a message for the recent 33rd anniversary of the 1986 Edsa People Power Revolution said it was the Filipino people and not the yellows who toppled the dictator. A candidate for the Senate, Samira Gutoc Tomawis urged the Filipino people to forget the divide between the yellows and the DDS (Diehard Duterte Supporters). Both statements surrender to the rhetoric of the current Malacañang occupant who has all but proclaimed that all evil comes from the yellows. Should the imperfections of the LP and of the two Aquino presidencies become the settled meaning of yellow? Most certainly not, if one continues to cherish the justice-based national renewal espoused by Ninoy, the democracy for which Cory stood, and the courage with which the Filipino people took to streets across the country during the Edsa Revolution of 1986. Filipinos were not wrong when they embraced yellow as their symbolic color in the years leading to and during the Edsa Revolution. There were not two groups of people, yellows and Filipinos then. There were vast numbers of Filipinos standing in yellow. We are not wrong today when we continue to embrace yellow as we assert alternative thought against a mob of fanatics ever ready to say “Amen” to every pronouncement from Malacañang, ever ready to try to shout down those who think independently. Just because the Philippine flag was first displayed to the public by a president whom historians have shown to be responsible for the execution of the hero Andres Bonifacio does not mean we do away with the flag. Just because the Cross was an emblem of ruthlessness under imperial Rome and with the sword a symbol of the greed of the conquistadors does not mean it no longer speaks of the love that led to the sacrifices of Jesus Christ, of Saint Peter, of Saint Andrew. When you read rottenness into a color (upon a supposed leader’s insistence), instead of choosing to remember the fortitude of your elders that gave the color its meaning, what does that say about your appreciation of the goodness in your history that is part of the reason you live, and live free? When you refuse to listen to legitimate critique of the government, say, in defense of the poor and helpless, and dismiss it as a feeble attempt at restoration by a spent yellow force, what does that say of your claims of denouncing corruption, of championing nationalism, or of loving humanity? Who rides the coattails of irrational hatred of yellow? Are they not the ones who are remorseless about their thievery, who have the blood of the innocent on their hands, who think Filipinos will forever be an unthinking, pliant flock to drive hither and thither according to whim? Beware of those who, with the mobs they hold in thrall and to regain power read into yellow the decay that is eating at their hearts of stone.

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