We shoot dreamers, don't we?
By Noralyn Mustafa

IT was a time pregnant with expectation, a pervading sense of dread, a nagging fear of some impending event that was all the more foreboding because it was, up to the time, uncertain; spread only by rumors, although long predicted by the more discerning.

It was a few weeks before martial law was proclaimed by Ferdinand Marcos.

By then, Victor Corpus had raided the armory of the Philippine Military Academy and defected, and Sulu's lone candidate in the PMA, Ahlul Anni, had gone missing from the cadet contingent during the June 12 Independence Day celebration.

And there I was in downtown Baguio, haggling with a taxi driver over the fare to the academy where I was going to fulfill a promise to visit some cadets who had been our guests in Jolo that past summer.

Then, a man approached us, extricating a stick from a pack of cigarettes he had just bought from a sidewalk vendor, from where I presumed he had overheard my bargaining bout and without any preliminaries, simply offered me a ride because, he told me, he was bound for the PMA himself, to visit his son.

"Hop in," he said, and I did without hesitation because those were the days when you didn't suspect this to be a pickup. What followed was probably the next harrowing scene to a roller-coaster ride, but I had no regrets because he turned out to be one of the most interesting people I have talked with.

He was himself a PMAyer, a retired army colonel, and had earned his MS in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also disclosed he was an inventor, saying the word with the fingers of one hand drawing quotation marks in the air, rather self-deprecatingly.

But why did he sound unhappy over being an inventor?

"You would too, if none of your writings ever got published," he replied.

He said he had filed several applications with the patent office for his many inventions and improvisations, but he had yet to receive a single approval.

But worse than that was the bitter experience of a colleague, a chemical engineer, whose formulation of a certain product, with patent pending, soon realized that what he thought was exclusively his intellectual property was already being marketed.

"That office is really a graveyard for dreamers," he said, adding, "in fact this country kills dreamers."

Beginning even in the home, he said, the dreamer, the one who thinks differently, who "envisions wild things," is often ignored by parents and ridiculed by siblings. In school, both teachers and classmates conspire to alienate him with some form of rejection, ranging from suspicions that he is gay, to extreme manifestation like ostracism.

The Filipinos as a race can measure up to international standard in terms genius and creativity, but like prophets they are never appreciated in their own country, he lamented.

He cited the designer of the lunar module, and the formulator of Quink as among those who saw their dreams realized in another country.

When we arrived at the PMA, his son, a fitting image of his father, welcomed us, but before I could say goodbye to them, the colonel came near me and shared a secret: this jeep that brought us here was running on alcohol and water.

I never met him again, never got to know how our roller-coaster ride was powered by water, or whether any of his inventions had been awarded a patent.

But it was to him and our conversation that my thought turned when President Macapagal-Arroyo announced with a triumphant smile beneath the Hilterish side-bang (who ever designed that hairdo should be made to spend Christmas in a concentration camp), that Captain Panfilo Villaruel and Navy Lieutenant Ricardo Catchillar who earlier had taken over the air traffic control tower at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport, had been "neutralized," a word, by the way, that fascinates me, in much the same way as "salvaged" did when it came into usage in its peculiar meaning in the 1970s.

I don't know what drove Villaruel to do what he did, nor why half his face was blown off for it. Did he have other dreams aside from the science wooden plane and humming helicopters?

Were they too, ignored, ridiculed and aborted?

Did he know something we don't?

Now, as then, it is a time pregnant with expectation, a pervading sense of dread, a nagging fear of some impending event that is all the more foreboding because it is uncertain, spread only by rumors, although seen with crystal clarity by the more discerning.

There is this persistent unease of being part of a pastiche that is almost surreal.

What appears, or is made to appear, as reality, is actually made up of ill-designed scenarios and bad scripts.

Thereto is this sense of being taken on a roller-coaster ride powered by nothing but air, leading nowhere.

So much quid pro quo, back-chanelling, bargaining bouts that we don't overhear, and all these legitimized by an empty invitation to reconciliation. Hop in.

But we hesitate, because this is definitely a pickup and this constant calling on divine intervention only worsens our anxieties because it becomes clear as day that we are truly clutching at the last straws.

We too have our dreams. Very simple dreams that do not require genius and creativity. Dreams of statesmanship in our leaders, not brinkmanship and constant bickering. Economic growth that we see in our paychecks and on our tables and not just hear in the pronouncements of government.

But then, we shoot dreamers, don't we?

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