Honored guests, members of the graduating class, proud parents and relatives of the graduates, teachers and staff of the Naval National High School, friends, ladies and gentlemen.

More than two weeks ago, I got this surprise long-distance telephone call one evening at my house. Since the caller was not familiar on line, I had to ask for her identity a second time. She turned out to be Mrs. Telene Agang, one of your teachers, who was accompanied by Mrs. Corcor Napalit, your teacher-in-charge. I talked to both of them, one after the other. They informed me about the decision to invite me as your speaker in this ceremony. From their guarded and apologetic request, I could sense they were expecting a refusal for an answer. Instead, I accepted the invitation within two minutes. And I am very happy to be with you here today.

Anyhow, there was no way I would have refused the invitation from old friends. After all, I had been caught before in the same situation that Telene and Corcor were facing. I fully understood their anxiety and the ever present need to save face after owning up a responsibility.

Part of my principle in life is to return favors I have received. This could be sooner, or later. In the present case, I was returning recent favors I have received.

Last year, the University of the Philippines assigned me to conceptualize and coordinate the Balangiga Historical Tour, the UP’s lakbay-aral (study tour) from Sept. 26-28 to the famous town of Balangiga in southern Samar, where the elite Company "C" of the Ninth US Infantry was nearly wiped out during a morning attack by bolo-armed native fighters. The so-called "Balangiga Massacre" on Sept. 28, 1901 was the worst single defeat of the US military during the Philippine-American War at the turn of the century. Because I did not have a staff and a budget for this assignment, I therefore had to depend on the goodwill and help of so many people.

A significant component of the tour was the "National Symposium on the Balangiga Attack of 1901," which was held in Tacloban last Sept. 26. This activity was originally envisioned as the "Balangiga Round-Table Conference" with a generous budget. But the obstructionism and eventual pullout of an expected key supporter of the proposed conference effectively sabotaged the activity. As a face-saving alternative, I opted for the symposium, because I had already invited the speakers and they had agreed to come. I explained to them the switch from a funded round-table conference to a symposium without a budget.

The symposium was eventually held, and all the invited speakers came on their own initiative and expense. The highlight of the symposium was the ritual public embrace - as a gesture of reconciliation at the personal level - between the daughter of the first American soldier to be attacked in Balangiga and the great grandson of a Filipino fighter who actually clashed with this soldier. It was the first formal meeting of its kind between descendants of an American and a Filipino who fought each other in Balangiga in Sept. 1901.

The tour to Balangiga last Sept. 27 to 28 was also a big, successful event. It was participated in by more than 350 participants from the University of the Philippines, including the UP president and his wife, three vice-presidents, and other big personalities of the university. They returned to Manila very much satisfied by the whole experience, which had been likened to a pilgrimage.

Conceptualizing and coordinating the Balangiga istorical Tour was the most challenging and most humbling assignment so far in my career. It was challenging because the task could not be done by a single person working alone, but by cooperating groups of people who share a common vision and interest. It was also a humbling experience, because the tour succeeded despite possibilities of failure and disaster all along the way, from its conceptualization and planning to its implementation and conclusion. In the end, even the weather, usually inclement and stormy in September, was fully cooperative.

The Balangiga Historical Tour was later considered the "heart" of all four or five lakbay-aral components of the 1998 U.P. Centennial Celebrations. It was also the most publicized UP centennial activity, with two front-page feature articles in the Philippine Daily Inquirer last October.

Today, I stand before you as a native son of Naval. And I prepared a speech for your original venue, the Naval Municipal Quadrangle. (Note: The venue was transferred on graduation day to the Gymnasium of the Naval Institute of Technology because of bad weather). This is my first formal speaking engagement here during the 1990s. But this one is symbolic and emotional for me.

On the stage of the Naval quadrangle, I spoke as a graduating university student one evening in January 1980, or nearly 20 years ago. The occasion was the miting de avance (final rally) of the local candidates who opposed the KBL or Kilusang Bagong Lipunan, the political party of the Marcos dictatorship. It was probably the first attempt by a young student to speak before a big political rally in our town.

Of course, it was neither healthy nor convenient to oppose the KBL at that time. But I did my act out of principle, out of a youthful sense of morality. Unfortunately, principle and morality were much cheaper values compared to political opportunism at that time, and even now. Still it was one act that I did not and will never ever regret.

As expected, the KBL won by a landslide in January 1980, during the first local elections since the declaration of martial law in September 1972. After all, that political party had vast resources at its command, aside from having the advantage of a shameful and one-sided "block voting" system.

The local election of 1980 was a milestone in the history of Naval. It started the systematic cycle of political arrogance and vendetta in this town, and I and my father, now a retired policeman, were among the initial victims. It was really that nasty. After I returned to the university for the last weeks of my undergraduate studies, some of the political winners sent communication to my sponsor, the Philippine Coconut Producers Federation or COCOFED, petitioning to strip me of my scholarship and its privileges for being anti-Marcos. The petition was presumably ignored because I made it to my graduation.

But I could not get rid of the other threat. A top-ranking political official of this former sub-province swore that I could not find a job in Biliran. Thus, I had to find my place elsewhere. And, as if my difficulties were not enough, the same political winners tried economic strangulation of my family. Political pressure on his superiors forced my father, the sole family breadwinner, to be reassigned to police stations outside Naval. This remained so until his retirement in 1983.

However, the systematic harassment failed. The political landscape had changed. And our family endured and prevailed, without ever bending a knee before the powers that be at that time.

I have long forgiven the harassing acts of my family’s tormentors. In fact, I found out that I could talk or work with some of them in some projects in later years. But I always remembered my family’s and my own common suffering, and this helped provide the energy and the motivation for me to go deeper into the study of the history of our town and province. For my efforts along this line, I was given the 1997 Kasaysayan Award by the Biliran Provincial Government. The awarding rite was held right here in this venue (NIT Gymnasium), but I was not around to personally receive the award.

What I found during my research provided valuable answers to many confusions of my young life. They also served as academic inputs to official documents of the mass-based movement to convert Biliran into a separate and full-fledged province during the late 1980s. I hope that those among you who have come across any of my historical articles share my findings and insights about Naval. Here are two of them:

1. The Navaleños are a very democratic people. Natives of this town are fiercely independent-minded and would not allow differences in economic status and intellectual capacity to pre-determine the outcome of any democratic debate.

2. There was politics of magnanimity in Naval before martial law in 1972. Until then, elections here were just a game. There was a forgive-and-forget attitude among the participants after every electoral exercise, and the losers would even join the celebrations of the winners.

In contrast, at present, our town’s body politic is grievously shattered and divided. It seemed to have succumbed to internal forms of oppression and subtle external threats. "No vote, ibot (pull away)" has become a fact of life and a new tradition. The feeling of political hatred and revenge is thick in the air. In this regard, perhaps we can take a humble lesson from our forefathers’ example. It is not too late to retrieve the sense of community and togetherness and the sense of magnanimity that helped our town survive centuries of challenge and adversity.

The independent-mindedness and defiant nature of the Navaleños are rooted in our particular psyche and historical experience. Our forefathers fought all forms of external oppression. One of them was Lapulapu, our national hero whom I theorized in a published paper to have settled within the geography of our town. He was seemingly the reference person for the name "Bagasumbol," our town’s old name. The literal translation of "Bagasumbol" is "like a symbol of a great victory or conquest." Naval’s old name therefore was like a memorable ethnic trophy of war.

Our forefathers also fought, and won, against successive waves of Moro raiders. And contrary to what our history textbooks tell us about America being our nation’s savior, our forefathers in Naval fiercely fought against the American invaders and their sponsored constabulary at the turn of the century. This is mentioned in published official reports of the period. As a result, and unknown to most of you yet, our town also became victim of the American military’s "kill and burn" policy.

The island of Biliran was the experimental battleground of the Philippine Constabulary following its creation in 1901. This was their original "killing fields" during the Pulahan Wars in 1902. Indeed, accounts of the constabulary’s shameful experiment in Biliran could fill a mysterious gap in existing written histories of that organization.

So bloody was the American heritage in our town and province that when the next set of invaders - the Japanese - came to our island, our people chose to stay actively neutral throughout much of the World War II years. This neutrality was the historical context of the Biliran-phase of the study tour of a group of Japanese - one professor and five of his students - from Tokyo International University, which I facilitated last week. Let me expound a bit on this aspect of my personal and professional advocacy, intended to contribute to the "global citizen" program of a Japanese university, and now on its fourth year in Leyte.

The focus of the tourism program in the country, in the Leyte-Samar region, and even in our province is on what we call "tourist sites," comprising of white beaches, waterfalls, caves, swimming pools, and ati-atihan type street dancing. I have always been wary of this approach, which shows an artificial and homogenized view of our country and region. I am vocal about this wariness and people I know in the regional tourism office, including the regional director, are aware of this.

So, for an alternative, I acted to emphasize the local history of our region and province as a particular attraction for tourists. I have already done this for Balangiga. In the case of Biliran, I came across the memoir of Mr. Kennosuke Nakajima, a Japanese radio operator who was assigned in the towns of Biliran and Leyte-Leyte during World War II. Mr. Nakajima mentioned that Biliran was a very peaceful place during the war. His observations were confirmed by several unnamed Filipinos cited in the published book, whom I traced to be still alive and were interviewed by the Japanese visitors.

In their after-visit reports, one student commented: "When I came here in 1997, I was very sad to know that many people were killed in Leyte during World War II. I thought that war is really undesirable for every ordinary person. This time, I found there is another aspect of that war. In Biliran, Filipinos had good relations with the Japanese soldiers because no battle occurred in that island. The situation here was different from that of the nearby Leyte Island."

Another student commented: "I read Mr. Nakajima’s book and changed my mind about World War II ... I was excited to come to Leyte and Biliran. When I talked to (Captain) Sasaki’s fiancee, the Chinese lady, and Nene’s sister, I found many aspects of war. The Chinese lady told us that the time of the Japanese occupation was great (that is, it was like a long vacation). But Nene’s sister had an unforgettable hardship at the same time. Everyone had his or her own story and the war should not be judged from only one point of view and value. This was the most important lesson I got from this study tour ... I would like to learn more about the past in the search for a hopeful future."

Still another student commented: "I was very much impressed by the ‘real’ war story from the people in Nakajima’s book. War is very cruel and bloody for any people. But as I heard stories from people in that war, I gradually felt I have to know the reality of the war. I need to identify the ‘real history’!"

In our quest for peace and amity, not only among people from different nations but also among ourselves in this town and province, we do not need foreign solutions and formulas. We only need to look into our culture and heritage for guidance and inspiration.

I have used a homegrown formula in confronting the American and pro-American Filipino audience with the Balangiga event and its aftermath in 1901, and the Japanese audience with their World War II conduct in Leyte and Biliran. Frankly, the Americans were more savage and cruel than the Japanese in fighting against Filipinos in our region. Yet many of us consider America as the savior and Japan as the enemy. This is one colonial baggage we must get rid of in our quest for self-reliance and self-determination as a town, a province, and a nation. We need to look at people from other nations, especially our former colonizers, from a more objective and dispassionate perspective.

I hope my message reached you, dear members of this year’s graduating class. In summary it is this: We need to promote a continuing process of reconciliation and peace at the person-to-person level to be able to live in a better world. No matter how long and tedious it takes. In the case of Balangiga, it could take a hundred years. In the case of the war with Japan, it could take 60 years or more. In the case of our local political bickering, it could take 20 years, or 10 years, or five years, or less than a year. The prospect of success is not high; it is often low. But it does not mean that we stop trying.

What I have just told you are some aspects of my life’s pursuits. As a teacher myself, I am of the belief that the teacher not only imparts knowledge, skills, and attitude to his or her students. Subconsciously or unconsciously, he or she also imparts his or her lifestyle and personal outlook to the students.

I believe in teaching as a role-modeling process. Because of this, I dismiss the dictum that says, "follow what I say, do not follow what I do," which is a principle that many teachers abide by. In my years of teaching, I always told my students, "if you cannot follow what I say, follow what I do." Then I point to my published articles, my different advocacies for the underdog and the underserved, and other academic outputs for examples.

To the teachers and staff of the Naval National High School, congratulations for a job well done in rearing up this year’s batch of graduates. Teaching high school students is perhaps the most challenging facet of the teaching profession. The teenage years are a stage when young people grapple with their own selves in their search for an identity and a place in society. In the process, they oftentimes rebel against their parents and elders, and even against their teachers. But once this confusion has been overcome, the teacher as counselor can take pride in the fact that he or she has contributed to the maturation process of his or her students.

To the parents of the graduates, treat your children as responsible people who can make informed decisions about how to live their lives. And most importantly, do not ever make poverty an excuse for not sending them through college. Compared to my time, there are more opportunities available at present for them to achieve higher education. That is, if they have the interest and attitude to pursue this goal.

Let me end this speech at this point. Thank you very much for your kind attention. Good evening.