Tag Archives: Maguindanao masssacre

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Something more to remember than just a JFK-pencil.jpg

I wrote this in remembrance of John F. Kennedy before going to rest for the day last Friday and prayed things would turn out better for justice to the massacred journalists in Maguinadanao.

There are some things that we never should forget. Papang Noli (my father) extolled the way JFK spoke and lived and cherished those ideals as he did JFK’s brother Robert. I was only three years old when I saw so much sadness in him about the JFK assassination in 1963 that ended a great democratic legacy of leadership.

That force of vision of democracy and justice after JFK has eluded even many Americans to this day who have pursued a path beyond democratic justice that seemed reaching out to a just world order for the poor developing world
in JFK’s time.

The Philippines would be under martial rule in the next decade that pretended to protect democracy at the expense of human rights. The evil that put a veil on American democracy led them to tolerate dictatorship in many Latin American countries and the Philippines in that inclusive period of the American campaign against communists in Latin America and Asia.

I was 26 when Cory Aquino went to a joint US Senate and House session to address it and called the US the home of democracy, so fresh when this country in the far east had regained freedom and democratic governance. Political clans have regained clout after 1986 in this country from cronies of government in the era of martial rule, as if we had not learned to respect the future of the poor man.

The poor will sit in uncertainty when men like JFK and Ninoy Aquino could be shot with impunity. And what future do the poor have when kin of massacred journalists count injustice four years today after they were shot to death by brutal gunfire in Maguindanao. And despite the obvious, the culprits are buying time to wear off the the zeal of those who seek truth and justice.

Confidential files of the JFK assassination will be declassified in 2025, still a far 12 years from now. Any culprits other than the alleged lone gunman at the time of the assassination would most probably all be dead by then. What an escape.

Just think twice if anyone thinks justice comes with the Americans! I will be 65 by 2025. The ghosts that haunt its kind of democracy will cry for justice even far beyond 2025. I pray for the victims of the massacre of journalists in Maguindanao four years ago. I pray their kin will find justice. I pity JFK. (with a pencil drawing of John F. Kennedy via Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)

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