Another FQS?

I’m writing this piece on my 72nd birthday, so I hope you'll indulge me if I revert to the memory of another January 56 years ago.

- JOSE DALISAY

On the afternoon of Jan. 26, 1970, I milled with thousands of other young students on the campus of the University of Sto. Tomas, the staging ground for a large contingent of demonstrators marching to the Legislative Building near the Luneta (now the National Museum). President Ferdinand Marcos was going to deliver his State of the Nation Address, and a mass action had been called to protest a host of issues, from Marcos’ increasingly authoritarian rule to rising prices, militarization, corruption and Philippine subservience to American interests.

I had just turned 16, and was a senior and an activist at the Philippine Science High School. But I was no radical - not yet; I stood under the banner of the National Union of Students of the Philippines (NUSP), among so-called “moderates” led by Edgar Jopson, derided by FM as the “grocer’s son” and later to become a revolutionary martyr. Unlike the far-Left Kabataang Makabayan (KM) and the Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan (SDK, which I would soon join) who were railing against “imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism,” the NUSP’s cause sounded much more tangible albeit modest: a nonpartisan 1971 Constitutional Convention.

What happened next that afternoon, when both groups of protesters converged at the Senate, would change Philippine political history. The moderates had paid for the rental of the protest mikes and loudspeakers and wanted to pack up early, but the radicals literally seized the paraphernalia - and figuratively seized the day — launching into a verbal offensive that soon turned physical. Then a young journalist covering the event, Jose “Pete” Lacaba provides the reportage: