La Salle as rebel recruitment hub is just utterly ridiculous
A cock-and-bull invention.
That’s about as kind as I can be for now. As a proud Lasallite — this defiant, impish, insubordinate surrogate species of the more evolved and upright La Sallian — I have more in my hoard of unpublishable words than what I can manage to hurl at the moment.
I’ve spent a rather thought-provoking, though nonetheless rebellious, five years at the De La Salle University and La Salle Greenhills as one of the schools’ “go-to-the-principal’s-office” regulars.
Stubborn, absolutely ungovernable spirit, yes, but not the sort Karl Marx would entrust his dialectical materialism to unless he wanted it shred to smithereens.
In hindsight, it would be safe to say that I and the rest of the “Inglourious Basterds” discovered breakthroughs in the realm of juvenile delinquency like no one had ever done before. We were the quintessential bad boys in a school where Catholic boys were expected to be, well, boys, not revolutionaries.
My collective five-year stint in Taft Avenue and Ortigas was everything a boy of my damaged-to-the-bone proclivities would love to recall over bottles of beer, now that many are grandfathers.
Admittedly, our largely carefree lifestyle did much to alienate us from the more pressing issues surrounding martial law and the Marcos dictatorship.
None of it mattered, at least from where I was at the time. The media blackout of close to 20 years on the matter of martial law corruption and atrocities forced our defiant selves to seek our satisfaction elsewhere.
Many of the kids, including myself, hailed from families who played footsie with the Marcos régime. Cronies, they were called. The kids, on the other hand, were simply much too young, much too absorbed at spending a king’s ransom daily to even care, let alone understand.
Everything a note shy of trekking to the mountains and go gun-barrel-to-gun-barrel with Malacañang, like an all-nighter at Shakey’s in Ortigas Mall or Strumm’s — oh, Tia Maria! — was fair game.
If rushing to the hallways at the sight of a skirt from any of the exclusive girl’s schools is any indication of what was important to us boys back in the day, then you know where I’m going with this.
Like every other rich kid on the block, we reached for everything we could get our smooth hands on. Booze, babes, drag racing, discos, concerts, heavy metal rock, jazz fusion — been there, done that.
Some gambled their lives away, others spent their holidays in a tussle with rival gangs from other schools. By this, I mean we practically turned Unimart into a fight ring. And there were the majority who went on their lackluster lives minding their own business.
Truth to tell, kids suffered more from bullies in an exclusive school for boys than get whisked away by the ideology of rebel recruiters, if at all there were any to begin with. Believe me, I should know.
As a bumbling high school freshman, I had my share of bullies requiring me to pay up — P5-to-P10 each day — for their recess money. That was like handing over P500 to P1,000 today. This went on until I found out that I had it in me to land a fist to his face.
If you want to talk recruitment, know this: fraternities had more sway among spoiled little horrors like us than the Communist Party of the Philippines.
Communism hardly fit a school populated largely by the scions of cronies and capitalists. Whoever told the Armed Forces top brass that La Salle is a haven for NPA recruiters has sorely misread Dr. Seuss as a child.
Such a pity. Their childhood was one big fat lie.
My own readings of the works of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin came much later, outside the walls of La Salle. This was a result of my being a hapless bookworm. Not a single soul handed me a copy of Das Kapital, The Communist Manifesto or any literature dealing with wage-labor. I simply grabbed them off the shelves of bookstores and began reading.
As a bibliophile, I read much of everything — from Playboy’s Party Jokes to Leon Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, to say nothing of Ferdinand Marcos’ The New Society and the Marquis de Sade’s One Hundred Twenty Days of Sodom. As a young man, I was possessed with the level of curiosity cats would unabashedly kill for.
Even today, as a journalist, my reading regimen brings me to such works no one in his right mind should think of reading. “Banned” books, yes, with Incest by Anaïs Nin contributing in no small part to my idea about what’s wrong with the birds and the bees.
My largely left-of-center convictions are the upshot of reading various books and experience in the field. None of it came from a Marxist or Stalinist recruiter.
Not by any stretch of the imagination did my readings of Marx and Lenin and Antonio Gramsci made a communist out of me. What they did was turn me into a columnist (Marx was a journalist, did you know that?).
See, I have this pathological glitch in my frontal lobe. I shun authority.
Whether that authority comes from the far-Left or the far-Right, worse, the old, pathetic Center, makes little difference. I detest being told, or commanded as the case may be, as I am of the opinion (one I have to admit is totally smug) that whatever I can learn out there, I can learn all by myself. I didn’t go all this way to holding such opinions by staring on my toes, which I always do when forced to attend lectures.
Go ask my 80-year-old Mom who probably popped more antidepressants as she saw me grow up than her arthritis meds today.
Journalist H.L. Mencken said it best:
“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out… without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.”
Only in this respect that I and an active slew of protest writers can be considered “dangerous” by a regime dead set on stamping out anyone who gets between its hands and the cookie jar.
For all their efforts to shape boys like us into good men, in many ways, the La Salle brothers had succeeded. La Salle is a haven for Catholic thought, faith in Christ, and compassion for the poor. I have only the highest respect for La Salle brothers who, in fact, had the superpower to leap over fences if only to stop students from coming to blows.
An exclusive school for boys is not your average daycare center. Try managing one.
While unruly brats like us were more the exception than the rule, the seed they planted bore some fruit, enough for even the worst rapscallions to turn into productive members of society.
I have said this before and I will say it again: an abusive regime is the best recruiter of rebels.
Our universities, for lack of a better term, may well be described as a sanctum for coming-of-age stories, tales of unbelievable mischief, mishaps and misadventures.
If, at some point, a student or two choose to brave the mountains and join the armed revolution, no other recruiter should be held liable than the Terrorist at the Palace.
- Photos used with permission from Chito Genito
