[av_one_full first min_height=” vertical_alignment=” space=” custom_margin=” margin=’0px’ padding=’0px’ border=” border_color=” radius=’0px’ background_color=” src=” background_position=’top left’ background_repeat=’no-repeat’ animation=”]
[av_heading heading=’ PEOPLE POWWOW ‘ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=’30’ subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=”]
BY HERBERT VEGO
[/av_heading]
[av_textblock size=” font_color=” color=”]
Sunday, August 20, 2017
[/av_textblock]
[av_textblock size=’18’ font_color=” color=”]
YESTERDAY, we commemorated the 139th birthday of the late Manuel Luis Molina Quezon, the first President of the Philippine Commonwealth, who was born on Aug. 19, 1878.
In fact, we remember Quezon the whole month of August because it is the National Lung Month as declared by President Ferdinand Marcos on July 24, 1978 through Presidential Proclamation No. 1761. Quezon died of tuberculosis, in his time a fatal respiratory disease, on Aug. 1, 1944.
Unfortunately, some of us no longer agree with his most famous quotation: “I prefer a government run like hell by Filipinos to one run like heaven by the Americans.”
“Us” in the preceding paragraph refers to us who suffered under Marcos’ martial law in the 1970s. It also refers to us today who feel that we are now run like hell by President Rodrigo Duterte, whose “war on drugs” has become an excuse for extrajudicial killings. But that’s another story.
Going back to the run-like-hell quote, Quezon said it before the United States Congress in May 1910 when he was resident commissioner of the Philippine Assembly. Our country having been colonized by the US, Quezon was clamoring for grant of Philippine Independence.
With that speech, Quezon was hoping to melt contrary opinion in the homeland. Some people were wishing for annexation of the Philippines to the United States – just like Hawaii.
Of course, he could have been personally motivated. That early, Quezon was hoping to be president of the Philippines.
By the time Franklin D. Roosevelt became president of the United States in 1933, the majority of the Filipino people had shown solidarity behind Quezon’s clamor for self-rule. The US government agreed to a transitory commonwealth Philippine government under the supervision of an American high commissioner.
Quezon had died when I was born. But he was such an idol to me that I studied journalism in a private school named after him, the Manuel L. Quezon University (MLQU) in Quiapo, Manila.
A columnist once wrote this trivia about the man:
“I remember my grade-four teacher joking, ‘Don’t be like Quezon. He was a lazy student who disliked doing his homework.’
“But she was quick to add that when the revolutionary forces of Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo declared revolution against the Spanish regime in 1898, Quezon was among those who bravely took up arms.’”
After the Spanish-American war, Quezon resumed his law studies at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, passed the bar and practiced law.
In 1907, he won a seat in the Philippine Assembly. In 1916, he was elected to the Senate and became its president.
Leading a mission to the United States, he worked for a bill that would eventually be passed as the Tydings-McDuffie Law, providing for Philippine independence to take effect in 1946.
In September 1935, Manuel Quezon and Sergio Osmeña were elected president and vice president, respectively, of the Philippine commonwealth.
In November 1941, Quezon was reelected president of the commonwealth. When the Japanese forces occupied Manila in 1942, he and his Cabinet fled from the Philippines and set up an exile government in Washington in May 1942. He died of tuberculosis in Australia on Aug. 1, 1944, a year before the liberation of the Philippines.
Had history had not unfolded the way it did, could we have become the 51st state run like heaven by Uncle Sam?
That’s possible. But there is really no way of knowing what might have been. For like the residents of Guam, we might have lived princely but now cowering in fear of North Korea’s threat to unleash its hellish nuclear warhead. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
[/av_textblock]
[/av_one_full]
