61
21 Awareness
A key word throughout the long history of peasant organizations in the
Philippines is awakening or awareness.
It means, first of all, waking up to one’s capacities as a human being
in association with fellow humans. The prime capacity is to reflect on one’s
own condition which leads to a faith in or awareness of one’s own dignity.
More often than not, this awareness comes about in the exposure of the
unjust and oppressive practices of the oppressor.
A peasant asked a group at one time: how do we go about this ^process of
exposure so that more peasants will achieve awareness? Do we start removing,
the oppressor’s “shoes” – or that part of his unjust practices that affect us
directly, and wait for others to similarly remove his pants, shirt, etc. until
he is totally exposed? Or do we also actively participate in the removal of the
other “parts”?
62
At the first stage of awareness, another peasant says, my first reaction
was to my immediate environment and my immediate enemy. When I am bitten by a
mosquito, my immediate reaction is to kill the mosquito. I do not determine
then and there where the mosquito comes from so as to eliminate it totally, nor
do I think immediately of buying a mosquito net or a mosquito killer.
Ordinarily, I wait till I can't stand mosquitoes anymore. Then I might take
another form of action other than killing the mosquito or slapping myself in
trying to kill it.
There are indeed many degrees of awareness or awakening, Mang Paeng says, depending on how
involved we are with other peasants and their allies in trying to change the
oppressed peasant condition.
The process of unifying hitherto isolated individual peasants finds a
common program and a common total vision.
The total vision is the HUMAN COMMUNITY – a community where there is
justice. Mang Paeng says,
it is HEAVEN that starts on earth – a community where there is no exploitation;
where every man, woman and child live together without fear, with love and
respect for one another.
But the Word must ever become FIesh, Mang Paeng adds. This means that
our vision must “be translated into immediate, concrete programs of action –
or, he quips, we might all end up with a stiff neck indulgently looking up to
the blue.
63
We are co-creators, remember? Mang Paeng continues. Our present manifold struggles are just a
few among many more to create the “new” from the "old"; the new man
and the new woman in a new economy, a new polity, and a new culture. Hence, our
program is always provisional but not arbitrary – combining the experience of
people’s participation and the ideology of people's reflections all through the
years.