Taps [noun]

A call blown at military funerals and memorial services

MUST an innocent die for reforms to even be considered? Must it take civil disobedience, massed indignation, the horror over the slaying of a young life -or any life- to drag the authorities, kicking, screaming, hurling abuse and pointing fingers at the most absurd of suspects, to the bargaining table, when common sense has long dictated that reforms are urgently needed? Why must we have to have a human holocaust to get our officials to
think about the interests of the country and its people?

I wonder. It too the discovery of the tortured, dead body of Mark Wilson Chua to finally achieve what generations of Filipino students have been saying all along; what the wiser of our political leaders have been proposing all along; what even the heroes of Bataan and Corregidor felt was needed all along, after they lived through the hell that was our futile yet valiant fight against the Japanese -the complete re-thinking of the national military service requirement.

Mark Wilson Chua died, as so many have died, in a cruel manner because he dared to expose corruption in high places, and the defects of system rotten to the core. It took his death for
competing universities to unite, and for students and faculty to find a common cause: the abolition of the ROTC requirement.

The Reserve Officer Training Corps was created to provide the armed forces with trained reservists who would come in handy in times of war or national emergency. Manuel A. Roxas, Benito Soliven, Jacobo Zobel prior to World War 2 felt it their solemn duty to undergo military training; their training turned them into heroes who fought in Bataan and sacrificed much for their country. And yet what a younger generation forgets is that these men volunteered to enlist in the ROTC. Emphasis on volunteered. They not only volunteered to undergo training, but
when their country was at war, they gave up the comfort and privileges of their social status and official positions to fight. And they fought. They served.

This is the idea behind the ROTC, an idea and ideal which has been forgotten. There were others, such as one time Philippines Free Press writer Philip Buencamino III, who also underwent military training as required by law prior to World War 2, but who reflected, in the trenches in Bataan, that all he had learned during his training was how to plant trees and beautify the camp he was assigned to, and that his officers had never even given him a chance to fire a single practice shot.

This was sixty years ago come December 8. In the years since then, the military service requirement has become more of an imposition than a means for character building or the fostering of discipline and patriotism. It has become a means for fostering corruption, for influence peddling, for racketeering and the abuse of human rights. Far from building characters and fostering patriotism, it has bred cynicism, criminality, corruption and now, murder.

The obligation of a citizen to render service to the state must be balanced with a corresponding obligation on the part of the state to ensure that the service it requires is useful, rational, and
promotes rather than retards civic virtues. The state may and should require national service, but it must take realities into account. The realities are these: that today, the ROTC requirement as it exists imposes an unonscionable financial burden on parents; it breeds corruption among the officer corps; it foments a lack of respect for authority on the part of students subjected to a manifestly outdated system; it takes away time and resources necessary for the education of the young, without giving anything back, either to the state, or to the young.

This means that the calls for reform must be answered lest the very bedrock of our constitution and the ideals that it aims to promote -ideals consistenty upheld in all our constitutions since
1935- are simply abandoned and disavowed by the young.

The reforms needed are these: to eliminate mandatory military training. To keep, if the government so wishes, optional military training, but in a way that does not make Filipino families pay for the service they are required to render. If uniforms are needed, government must issue the uniforms; if students must have snacks, let them be given snacks; if they elect to undergo military training, let them receive some sort of financial compensation by way of school subsidies or credits that dignifies their determination to be future officers willing to lay their lives on the line in defense of the country. Let those, most of all, who want to be soldiers be given something for something -such as a college education in full, in exchange for volunteering to be part of the national reserve.

And for those who would rather not march, let them not march. Let them be given options -the more, the better- to render service to the country, to explore ways to be useful to society even as they go through the process of college education. You need not be a cadet to help your country by planting trees; by volunteering to work in understaffed government offices; by teaching the poor, helping to feed the sick, by helping to poll watch during elections. The needs for volunteerism are so great, the opportunities for students to build character in a positive manner and make a concrete contribution to national development are endless. Let them donate blood to the Red Cross; let them learn first aid and CPR; let them wade through filth and muck and help clean up their neighborhoods.

Most of all, let them have the freedom of choosing how to serve their country best. Let them concentrate on their studies first, for fewer and fewer are getting educuated at all. There is no greater motivation to selflessness and sacrifice than to say: your country needs you, and will give you every means to help your country.

Instead what we have seen is a country that says you will serve, but not only serve, but serve under the most dehumanizing of conditions, and pay through the nose for serving when the
service is so obviously useless. Columnists have ranted that the young are gleefully marching in the streets because they simply want a way out; but they are supported by their teachers, their
college presidents and rectors. They have a cause, and that cause is good - it is a cause born of a genuine love of country.

You want to keep students responsible, you want to prevent their feeling they can get off the hook, you want to prevent a slide into anarchy or surrender to it: give students and their parents and their schools options that make sense. That make service genuine and not something closer to indentured servitude.

The 12th Congress will open with a flood of bills and proposals to eliminate the ROTC requirement. Those that beleive that service must be an integral part of education must stop harking back to the past, but look to the future. They must look at the present and see where errors have been committed, abuses allowed to continue unabated. And I think that in doing so they will see that the youth will then answer their country's call, for their country finally will show that it recognizes that love of country must be earned even as it must be expected.