September 21, 1972: The Beginning of the Age of Brainwashing
September 21, 1972 was a day like any other in my carefree childhood years growing up in a peaceful city like Baguio.
I was in the Grade Two, Section 2 class of Mrs. Esther dela Cruz, our homeroom teacher in Baguio Central School, which was right behind City Hall, just across Kayang Street Extension.
Next to City Hall itself, my school building was the second most imposing edifice that side of town. The huge Justice Hall where it is now wasn’t there yet. That used to be a triangular park with no other feature than grass and several pine trees, the oldest perhaps no more than ten years. They were young trees just planted around a newly-built picnic grove.
The only other significant building nearby was that Masonic Temple across the street—and it looks exactly the same today as it did in 1972.
If you turned to face north, you could see the Officers Club building at Camp Henry T. Allen—which was an exclusive gated housing subdivision for military officers and their families.
I didn’t get the sense that it was only for high-ranking officers. I had a classmate, Emmanuel Mendoza–a “gentle giant” of a kid–who lived in one cottage that faced our school. His father was no higher than a major in the Army but sentries at the gate saluted HIM—the nine-year old son of a major. So I’m guessing the armed forces family was still that small and intimate back then.
The mayor of Baguio was Luis L. Lardizabal—our teachers called him “triple L.” He was the guest speaker at almost every public occasion I could remember—maybe there just weren’t that many causes celebré available back then. And the man, who stood about 5 foot 4 inches—certainly no taller than Danny de Vito whom he also RESEMBLED—was notorious for giving the longest speeches.
We hated it, because we would bake under the morning sun at the school quadrangle during programs, waiting for him to finish delivering his speech standing under the cool shaded school stage.
We were children, for crying out loud—very little ones—couldn’t he have figured out that we didn’t really care to listen to long profound speeches?
He knew this, too, well enough to have fashioned a joke about it—and then he went on telling the SAME joke everywhere he spoke. I must have heard him tell the joke in 10 or 15 speeches, and it goes like this:
“I gave a long speech that bored everybody, except for one man who sat quietly listening throughout my speech until the very end. So as I came off the stage, I approached that man and shook his hand saying, ‘thank you for having the patience to listen to my whole speech. Everybody else thought it was boring and had stood up and left. I really appreciate you staying.’ Then the man replied, ‘I couldn’t leave, I just had to listen up to the very last word.’ I felt very proud and I asked ‘Really? You really felt you had to listen to my whole speech? Why?’ and he said ‘because I’m the one supposed to speak AFTER you!”
With a sick joke like that, which he retold a million times, we can’t understand why our school principal Mrs. Herrin kept inviting him to our school programs—and it just seemed like we had one EVERY month.
1972 was the year of the last Apollo Mission to the moon. It had been 3 years since Neil Armstrong walked on the lunar surface in 1969, and the moonlanding mania was waning.
Filipinos were refocusing on more earthbound concerns, like when is this weakening of the peso ever gonna stop? It’s trading almost FIVE PESOS TO THE DOLLAR now. If this slide continues, where are we going to get the dollars to pay for our crude oil imports? The 1970s oil crisis was in its early stage.
We were Grade Two. What do we care? We FELT the effects of the weak peso, we just didn’t need to make the connection. Ignorance was bliss.
The jeepney fare was FIVE CENTAVOS to ride in one of those short six-seater Baguio jeeps (not counting the driver and 2 more seated in front).
These were “AC” jeeps–short for “auto-calesa” which is all their design was meant to copy. Three people sat abreast on either side in the back, which featured the largest openside windows—just like a real calesa. When it rained, it was the passengers themselves who took care of unrolling the clear plastic tarps that were hooked on the side of the roof with sleeves that hang down from the sides.
You may find this hard to believe, but those little jeepneys weren’t “small” at all by any measure. Back in the day, those jeeps WAITED for 20 minutes in their loading terminals (“sakayan”) to get full! And that is during rush hour.
In the lull periods in between, there just weren’t that many passengers that many of these AC jeeps had a common “sideline.” They queued by that curbside in front of the City Market building, maybe a little off towards being right across the old Tiong San Bazaar (which was as new and spanking in 1972 as SM is today) to render a unique transportation service called “short trip.”
It was very expensive—you had to pay the equivalent combined fare of the full capacity (8 passengers) plus backload because you paid for BOTH ways coming and going, and a little bit more for the waiting time. So typically, a “short trip” would cost at least two pesos.
In 1972, that’s two large blue-tinted PAPER bills with Jose Rizal’s face on it. That’s right, the one-peso was still “papel” at that time.
It wouldn’t surprise me if—adjusted for inflation over the last 50 years—that might the equivalent of two blue-tinted ONE HUNDRED-peso paper bills with Manuel Roxas’ face on it today.
Taxis were an unaffordable extreme optional luxury—because the flagdown was TWENTY CENTAVOS and the “patak” was TEN CENTAVOS every 500 meters after that. The only good thing about it was that in an emergency, you could ride one without any money on you because when you got home, the taxi driver was always willing to wait while you ran up to your house and got the fare money from your parents.
In the unfortunate instance where you miscalculated and your parents are out, you could ask the taxi driver to come back for it the NEXT day!
That was okay, the taxi driver wouldn’t turn you in YET to the policemen—who wore khaki uniforms and smart-looking Pershing caps, like the ones worn by airline pilots.
I don’t know whose cheap fashion idea it was to replace those elegant “McArthur hats” with baseball caps like those worn by streetcorner thugs and rap music artists on MTV.
In the 1970s of my childhood, policemen were fearsome figures of authority–and not just necessarily because of martial law, either. It’s because they had these fat wooden dowels, called “batuta” that hang from their khaki belts, and they blew these really loud referee’s whistles. (“silbato”) It made this very shrill high-pitched blood-curdling sound that carried such a potent psychological punch that, very often, just the sound of it portending the approach of a batuta-wielding cop was enough to break up many ongoing brawls. Today It would take the sound of a rapid-firing machinegun to achieve the same effect.
So on that uneventful (to us) Thursday, September 21, 1972, right after flag ceremony, we filed into our classroom on the ground floor of the south wing of the Baguio Central School main building.
Something was wrong.
Something different was in the air. Our teachers were outside our room, clumping together in the hallway, nervously talking about something we couldn’t understand.
My Grade Two Section 2 class was not the so-called “star section”—that was the Section 1 “English Section.” I belonged to the second-tier “Pilipino Section” and my teacher Mrs. Dela Cruz made the somber announcement in Tagalog of what would be my first occasion to become aware that this thing called “martial law” had been declared.
But she never used the words “martial law.” I think the memo they got emphasized more on implementing IT, not really making “it” understood.
“O, mga bata, makinig nang mabuti!” she began, “simula ngayon, lahat magpapakabait na ha? Bawal na ang pasawayin, kung hindi, mapapalo. Simula ngayon, ito na ang lagi ninyong tatandaan: SA IKAUUNLAD NG BAYAN, DISIPLINA ANG KAILANGAN.”
The age of systematic brainwashing of the martial law babies’ generation–that was US–had begun.*
About the Author
The author is a writer and lawyer based in Baguio City, Philippines. Former editor of the Gold Ore and Baguio City Digest, professor of journalism, political science and law at Baguio Colleges Foundation (BCF). He is a photographer and video documentarist. He has a YouTube channel called “Parables and Reason”
About Images: Some of the images used in the articles are from the posts in Atty. Joel Rodriguez Dizon’s Facebook account, and/or Facebook groups and pages he manages or/and member of.