Many years ago, when dictatorship held sway over our land, a local theater group staged an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s play on the life of Galileo.
To the uninitiated, the play on the life of the ancient astronomer seemed innocent enough to pass the censors and get away with subversion. To those who understood the many layers of meanings embedded in the music and the dialogue, especially as they were magnified in translation, this was subversive theater at its best.
To begin with, Galileo himself was a subversive: not because he wanted to rabble-rouse for the heck of it, but because the truth he followed undermined the ruling doctrines of the day. In his day, official doctrine held the earth was flat and the stars were there to illuminate us, the point of all creation.
Galileo’s observations, using a crude telescope, indicated that the earth revolved around its axis. Not only that, it also appeared that the moon revolved around the earth and that the tandem revolved around the sun. The implication was that the earth and the moon were both round.
To the common sensibility of the time, these were ridiculous observations. The man had to be mad. In the streets, citizens poked fun at the stargazer, demanding him to explain why, if the earth was round, the seas did not spill off. They wanted him to explain why, if the earth was revolving on it axis, we did not spin off it or be dizzied by its constant turning.
The authorities of his time were not so given to humor. Galileo’s claims amounted to heresy. They gave the man a choice: recant his claims or burn at the stake.
Galileo famously recanted. He was awarded a villa and a stipend, both enabling him to continue on with his work.
Galileo’s outraged assistant confronted him angrily: why recant when they both knew he spoke the truth? The assistant was extremely disappointed that Galileo could not muster the heroism to stand by his discovery. The scientist calmly replied that society was not ready to deal with the truth. It was better that they take the stipend and continue on with their work than burn at the stake, their work unfinished.
That confrontation was the climax of this play. The dialogue haunted me for the rest of my life and guided many of the decisions I would subsequently make for myself.
“Pity the society that has no heroes,” the assistant shouted as he stormed out of the scene. “Pity the society that needs heroes,” Galileo muttered, almost to himself, as the lights dimmed and the play ended.
Galileo’s truth was so simple we now take it as self-evident. It was a truth that eventually dawned on all of us as the false orthodoxies of ancient ignorance fell away. No one needed to burn at the stake for something so obvious. It was the final wisdom of Galileo that he chose to live and work rather than court martyrdom and die a ridiculous death.
“Pity the society that needs heroes,” Galileo muttered. These are words of the wise. They add an element of pathos each time we observe the spectacle of crowds grieving the passing of those they revere as heroes and bemoan the community is lost because the heroes are gone.
There is no need to demean Cory’s heroism. Or Ninoy’s. The crowds that turned up to honor them when they died, a quarter of a century apart, honored lives well lived and meaningfully led.
It was right to honor Cory in the grandest scale we saw last Wednesday. She was a wonderful human being, a woman of great courage who stood by her truth heroically. She sacrificed tremendously for a vision that, in the last analysis, ought to have been self-evident to us all. As in the case of Galileo and his truth, the fact that Cory had to exercise such incredible heroism to speak the truth of our time should be adverse comment on our community.
There is serious anomaly in some of the things being said in the wake of Cory’s passing. Who will inherit her legacy? Who will carry her torch? Who will be the one to take her mantle and be the next hero?
Often, these were questions raised by the seriously anxious — and seriously dependent on the heroism of others. In enough instances, the past few days, these were questions raised rhetorically by politicians with self-serving agenda, anxious to inherit not so much Cory’s legacy but her constituency.
The politicians marred the purity of a nation rightfully expressing gratitude to a great person who served us well. They inflicted themselves on a solemn event, inflicted their banality on our people’s genuine mourning by trying very hard to politicize things to serve petty partisan goals.
Some of these politicians were simply cheap: they tried merely to be seen when it mattered. Others were more brazen: they tried vainly to inject anger into the mass mourning and turn it into a force against their rivals. One tried too hard to make Cory’s mantle his by taking out paid ads in the papers featuring his eulogy.
These are despicable acts all these efforts at mantle-grabbing. We must expose them as such.
Cory’s death diminishes us all in equal measure. We who expressed our mourning in the anonymity of great crowds, who trudged in the rain and braved the discomfort, did so because we are genuinely in grief. We did not do all that to make any political statement or be fodder for anyone’s political ambition.
Please do not use Cory for any personal political agenda. That will dishonor her. That will demean the great things she had done. We are not in quest of another hero. We are in quest of another future.