SERVE: Power of remembrance

Thirty-two months after its launch in September 2023, SERVE — a book co-authored by 19 campus journalists who witnessed the First Quarter Storm of 1970 as student activists, and chronicled the Filipino people’s struggle against systemic ills that stymied the country’s progress — is now on its second edition.

- SONNY COLOMA

I join my co-authors in inviting Filipinos interested in understanding the events of that momentous era to read our accounts and join us in reflecting how we could all learn from history.

Jo-Ann Maglipon, our colleague and book editor, has written a comprehensive review and I am pleased to share with you some key excerpts:

"Serve is not a self-congratulatory book. It is purposeful but, we trust, not smug. Its pitch is deliberate and, we also trust, not a decibel higher than is needed to make the point. All told, we go for the unhurried tone and the decorous language, avoiding breathlessness and belligerence. With our combined academic degrees, I suppose we imagine ourselves civilized.

"Seriously, this is who we are.

"We say dark times when we mean murderous times. We say events that profoundly changed our lives when we mean families torn, careers derailed, self-worth shattered. We say robbed of our rights when we mean bodily, mentally debased and defiled. We say moneys squirreled away into confidential funds when we mean taxpayers duped, defrauded, double-crossed. And we say autocrat and strongman when we mean murderer and dictator.

To write is already to choose. SERVE mirrors the hard choices made by campus journalists in Dekada 70 — and how they thrived thereafter.

"What's more, we want to reach people outside our circles—they who flinch before the harsh details of our past, they who like the distance offered by concepts and contemplations, they who find refuge in intellectual fogginess, they who require space to process the ugliness on their own.