The kind of ancestors we’ve had is not as important as the kind of descendants our ancestors have. This axiom is apt for the 135th birthday of President Sergio Osmeña this September 9.
Today’s rites in his native Cebu and elsewhere, honors President Sergio Osmeña who shephered a war-ruined country into a new republic. But on Wednesday, it will be back to business as usual.
Osmena’s delicadeza was so fine-tuned that once, he prohibited his son Sergio Jr. from accepting honoraria for lecturing at the University of the Philippines.
What does that life mean to Vice President Jejomar Binay? He lusts to pad into Malacañang as the country’s 16th president. Does he work by Don Sergio’s exacting standards?
Binay’s credentials are crumbling in the controversy over the P2.3-billion Makati City Hall building II which he built as mayor. “Without mountains, one would not see the plains.” So, Inquirer documented the contrasts.
Zuelling built it’s skyscarper at half the cost of city hall. It’s 33 floors of offices and floor area dwarfs that of Makati’s six floors. Zuellig is serviced by 21 elevators plus four escalators while Makati has two.
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certified Zuellig. Makati settles for, well, Mayor Binay Junior’s word.
City Hall II does not host a bakeshop that dispatches cakes on birthdays of senior citizens. Qu’ils magent de la brioche, Marie Antoinette said of starving citizens. “Let them eat cake”. She was guillotined.
Now, Binay courts telecommunications magnate Manuel V. Pangilinan to sign on as vice-presidential candidate. That’d be hilarious, if not insulting. Why not MVP for president? Or choose a woman like Corazon Aquino – say Senator Grace Poe?
Today, is Osmeña Sr. just an image on the P50-bill ? “The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.” Eight out of 10 students barely recall Sen. Benigno Aquino, or why he was gunned, surveys show.
“We have little collective memory of the past,” Ateneo University President Bienvenido Nebres, S.J., told at a Legacies of the Marcos Dictatorship conference. “We tend to live in a perpetual present. Thus, we cannot see well into the future.”
“We forget at the cost of betrayal. Amnesia over past crimes “reflects a weak sense of the nation and of the common good,” the late sociologist John Carroll wrote in “A Nation in Denial.” “Unless (the country reaffirms) those values, it may be condemned to forever wander in valueless power plays among the elite.”
“Remembering with undiminished intensity, over time does not make us curators of our ancestors’ grievances”. Instead, it buttresses against corrosive national amnesia.
Osmeña was bar topnotcher, journalist, governor, speaker of the National Assembly, senator, then vice president. He played key roles in major issues like the Tydings-McDuffie Act on independence.
One of his finest moments came in World War II’s government-in-Washington exile. The 1935 Constitution mandated that term of then TB-wracked President Manuel Quezon would end on Dec. 30, 1943.
Quezon dug in at this constitutional crossroad. “A local issue,” said US President Franklin Roosevelt who steered clear.
It was Osmeña Sr. who cobbled a way out — at his expense. Ask US Congress to suspend presidential succession, until after the Japanese occupation ended. Congress agreed on Nov. 10.
“Of his great services, none surpassed voluntary relinquency of the presidency,” former Free Press editor Frederic Marquardt wrote. “That office was the goal of his political life. [Yet] he gave (it) up… and signed away his right…”
“All he had to do was remain silent and the mantle of power would have fallen to him. He gave up what was rightfully his, in the interest of unity during time of war.”
On October 20, 1944, Osmeña waded ashore with General Douglas MacArthur at Red Beach in Palo, Leyte. With him were Generals Carlos Romulo, Basilio Valdes, and other key officers. He went on to restore the commonwealth government.
In 1946, Osmeña refused to campaign for reelection. Filipinos knew his record, he said. Like Winston Churchill, he misread our fickleness as voters. Manuel Roxas won.
Without rancor, Osmeña retired in Cebu. Late afternoons, he would take long walks without bodyguards, seeking no recognition. He died at 83.
“Civil authority is not personal but public,” historian Horacio de la Costa, SJ, wrote. “It belongs to no one either by right of birth or by virtue of some real or imagined excellence over other men, whether it be wealth, intelligence or power.”
“It belongs to the people, who may entrust it to whomsoever they freely choose.”
Neither does it endow the man to whom it is entrusted with any special gift of impeccability or infallibility. He may not claim thereby ‘the divinity that doth hedge a king.’
“His is a burden, not a privilege. He must spend himself in the public interests as though they were his own. Yet he may not derive any personal profit from his position. He is held accountable always for the authority he holds in trust.”
“When his mandate is revoked, he must be willing to relinquish that authority and return, a private citizen, to the ranks from which he came. Let him not expect any reward but the consciousness of having done his duty and served his people and his God.”
“Often he will get no reward but this. Nay, he may find in the end his name vilified, his motive misrepresented, his deeds misjudged. Austere are the laurels of the republic.”