If I was dead I would roll in my grave. Current cowboy President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte has allowed the remains of the country's former reviled corrupt dictator President Ferdinand Marcos to be reburied in the Heroes' Cemetery within Fort Bonifacio in Metro Manila.
This has occurred 27 years after his death and 23 years after his remains were flown to the Philippines from Guam. He died in exile in Hawaii in 1989, three years after public outrage had led to the snap elections of 1986 and the People Power Revolution in February 1986, which removed him from power.
The turning point had been public reaction to the assassination of his rival Senator Benigno 'Ninoy' Aquino in August 1983, just a couple of months before I travelled overseas for the first time, to the Philippines for three months, when I had just turned 24.
It was an 'exposure' experience that was part of my Jesuit training, and certainly a formative experience at a time when I was impressionable. I visited the Australian priest Brian Gore, who had been jailed for advocating for the rights of sugar workers. I spent time living with a destitute family in a squatter area in makeshift housing in a swamp in the southern Mindanao city of Davao.
But for the most part, I lived in comfort in the Jesuit Ateneo de Davao University while I did a kind of internship at the Mindanao Development Centre, which was a Jesuit work devoted to social action on behalf of the poor.
I was very happily and fervently caught up in the people's power movement that was prompted by the Aquino assassination believed to have been ordered by Marcos. I participated in events such as the 'yellow power' march through the main street of Davao every Friday. I am pictured in one of the marches, second from the left.
These days I follow developments in the Philippines through the excellent writings of Fatima Measham in Eureka Street. She migrated to Australia about ten years ago after completing her degree at the Ateneo de Manila Jesuit university.
After the reburial of the anti-hero Marcos in the Heroes' Cemetery, she wrote this week that 'young Filipinos, observing recent political disorder, had begun wondering whether Marcos was really that bad'. But predominantly 'the mood that prevailed throughout Philippine social media that day was one of intense disgust'.
The presence of millennials in the protests also demonstrates that protecting the truth matters... There had been real concern over the past few years that the distance of time, the lack of a definitive account in textbooks, the fact that Marcos' children hold political office, that not enough people were punished for embezzlement and human rights abuse — that these would lead to distortions and erosions of memory.
I am interested to explore possible parallels with protest in the United States following the election of Donald Trump as President. In a blog two weeks ago I castigated the protestors there for undermining democracy by refusing to accept the result. They were calling the election rigged in the way that Trump himself was expected to had he lost as was almost universally anticipated. A Jesuit I know in California reacted to my opinion, insisting that it does not represent the full story. I am interested in the full story and intend to write about it within the next few days.