4 God

4 God... The People... Owns the Land

Pedro Calosa of the Kolorum Movement put it succinctly in the 1930’s at the height of the peasant uprising in Northern Luzon: “God owns the land, the air, the water, sunshine – everything, and intended all these for the use of the people – all His children.

In the evening after a meager supper, peasants gathering at a baryo kapilya (village chapel) ask simple but pointed questions. We've often prayed the “Our Father,” a peasant leader starts. We do so because we are all His children. Can it be that God wills the land only for Don Jose and the landlords? "Thy will be done," we pray. Yes, what is God's will with regard to the land? My friends, it would seem correct to think that God wills the land for all of us to share. If He is our Father, then all goods must be family goods---to be shared by all.

It is wrong Kuya Terio continues, that we who till and need the land should continually be dispossessed by a few of its bounty.

Yes, an old peasant rises to speak, the land is like the air. It is just there for us to use in accordance with our need and labor. I did not ask to be born, he says, almost mad. But I was born to live – needing land, and air, and other things. The birds of the air and the animals of the field get what they need in order to live. Can anyone of us say they don’t have that right?

Why then are we denied the right to own the land we need to have a decent living? Why should only a few landlords who do not till the land own the most of it and reap the benefits of our labor? I say, we are poor, indeed, but it is an unjust situation. I can’t accept that it is in accordance with God’s will.

A silent Mang Fabio gets excited now. You re right, he says. Where is it written that God gave the land only to Don Jose and the landlords? Nowhere! Where then did the landlords get the land they now own? From their parent landlords, you'll say and these, where did they get the land? From their landlord forbears, you'll also say, who got them from their landlord ancestors. But I tell you, my friends, if we continue tracing the origin of landlord ownership, we must arrive

at a time when the lands were grabbed by force from our own great-great grandparents.

It was unjust for a few Spaniards to grab the lands from us. It is even more unjust that this dispossession of the majority be made to continue up to now.

At this juncture, another peasant adds: Even granting that landlords originally invested in the land a hundred years ago, who will deny that that investment has already been recovered by now – not twice but at least a hundred times over?

The problem is that by possessing a scrap of paper called a Title to the land, they think they are the real owners of the land. They forget that even before they or we were born, the land was already there; that after they or we have passed away the land will still be there – God’s gift to all.

We, too, must not forget that not even we are absolute owners of our own selves. Only God is absolute owner of all.

And how absurd is the argument, another peasant says, of those who claim absolute ownership over the land just because they were ahead of the rest in occupying it? They are like a person who went ahead to a theatre and claimed exclusive ownership over all the space – all the seats available – in complete disproportion to his or her seating needs. And when the rest of the people arrived trying, to get some seats, he forbade them –

saying that because he had arrived earlier, he was now absolute owner of all the space.

This is why, Kuya Terio stresses. I say again that we must regard the land, the air, water, the sunshine, all of nature’s bounty as destined by the Creator for the use of all.

It gets harder and harder for me to accept, Kuya Terio goes on, that my children have no birth right. “Thou shall not steal,” we are often told. It is clearer to me that the majority are poor because a few are appropriating more then they need or work for. We cannot let a few rob us of our birth rights and systematically kill us by this act of robbery – with our children undernourished and our bodies weighed down by tuberculosis. God, rather, is the God of life who wills that we all live, and struggle to live. The land and the water that we need for life belongs to us all.