Reference

Heroes are human too; they laugh, they cry, they make mistakes. Jose Rizal was no different.

To say he was an invincible champion who could do no wrong would be tarnishing the man Rizal
was, for although he had his fair share of flaws, he still managed to overcome them all and become
someone great.
Rather than thinking of him as the ideal hero, let’s think of Rizal as someone who was just like us,
yet persevered to become the great man we know him to be.

But Rizal was just any ordinary Pinoy: He fell in love, got heartbroken, and fell in love again. It is through
these stories that people can finally give a face to the otherwise trite Jose Rizal. However, along with
this simplicity also came the enigma even more intriguing than any Hollywood legend. Here are just
eight of the most insane myths and urban legends that have plagued Jose Rizal’s name over the years:

36 Amazing Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About Jose Rizal

 Rizal cured himself of tuberculosis and was later recognized as a tuberculosis expert.
 2. He Was Stingy Yet Spent Regularly On Photographs.
-While living in Europe, Rizal gained the reputation of a miser due to his extreme penny-
pinching ways (he supposedly lived on only P50 a month).

Before checking into hotels, he would always opt for a room without breakfast and
instead use the savings to buy tea, biscuits, and alcohol. He also rationed his portions
painstakingly. In one incident, he and his roommate Jose Alejandrino agreed to split a
box of biscuits between them for a month. The result? A starved Alejandrino finished his
portion in only 15 days while Rizal managed to make his own last the entire month.

Sometimes, Rizal would also neglect personal hygiene. In a letter to his sister, he
revealed that he went without taking a bath for a long time because he found them too
expensive. For all his stinginess, however, Rizal made sure to regularly allocate money
for photographs. The number of photos we have of him today is proof Rizal loved taking
pictures of himself.
 6. He Suffered From Bouts Of Depression.
-Like a normal person, Rizal also suffered from heartbreaks, homesickness and other
feelings of sadness. At one point, when he heard about his family’s land dispute and
persecution in Laguna, Rizal even wrote to Ferdinand Blumentritt just on the eve of his
departure to Brussels that he would have committed “a great folly” were it not for his
faith in God.
 While Rizal never explicitly stated what his phrase meant, author Jose Baron Fernandez
postulated Rizal was likely thinking of committing suicide because he felt guilty about
causing his family pain and suffering.
 He Was Torpe.
-Given the number of women who went in and out of his life, it would seem
counterintuitive to think Rizal was “torpe.” Yet for the Don Juan that he was, Rizal
experienced a case of cold feet in his liaison with his first love Segunda Katigbak.

Although Katigbak was already engaged to be married to Manuel Luz, Rizal still fell for
her anyway, describing her as “bewitching” and “alluring.” For the young lovers, it was
love at first sight—one that would be doomed from the start, in part because of
Katigbak’s engagement and because of Rizal’s indecisiveness.

It happened like this: Sometime in December 1877, Rizal promised to escort the carriage
carrying Katigbak when it passed by Calamba on the way to her hometown in Lipa. True
enough, Rizal did show up riding a white horse and spotted Katigbak waving a white
handkerchief to him from inside the carriage. Surprisingly, Rizal—instead of following
the carriage—turned around and went home.

While we may never know what spurred him to do so, Rizal certainly was heartbroken
as could be clearly seen in his farewell poem dedicated to Katigbak:

“Ended at an early hour, my first love! My virgin heart will always mourn the reckless
step it took on the flower-decked abyss. My illusions return, yes, but indifferent,
uncertain, ready for the first betrayal on the path of grief.”

Jose Rizal and Leonor Rivera.

Jose Rizal and Leonor RiveraAlthough our history books suggest that Rizal was somehow a playboy,
there’s no doubt that his first love was Leonor Rivera, his near-cousin and childhood sweetheart who
became the inspiration behind the character Maria Clara in Noli Me Tangere.

A native of Camiling in Tarlac, Leonor Rivera captured Rizal’s heart when they met during the former’s
13th birthday party. Rizal was then a medical student who boarded at the Casa Tomasina, which at that
time was managed by the Riveras. Bumping into each other was inevitable: Leonor and Rizal’s youngest
sister, Soledad, were both boarding students at La Concordia College. Before long, the casual encounters
blossomed into a full-fledged romance.

For a decade (1880-1890), the star-crossed lovers wrote each other countless of letters, even after Rizal
left for Europe to further his medical studies. They continued to keep in touch, but they never saw each
other again–no thanks to Noli Me Tangere which already reached the Philippines and had put anyone
close to Rizal under scrutiny. Worse, Leonor’s mother, who was already aware of Rizal’s reputation as a
“filibusterer,” bribed the local postal clerk so the letters wouldn’t reach Leonor.

NOLI ME TANGERE

To My Fatherland:

Recorded in the history of human sufferings is a cancer of so malignant a character that the least touch
irritates it and awakens in it the sharpest pains. Thus, how many times, when in the midst of modern
civilizations I have wished to call thee before me, now to accompany me in memories, now to compare
thee with other countries, hath thy dear image presented itself showing a social cancer like to that
other!

Desiring thy welfare, which is our own, and seeking the best treatment, I will do with thee what the
ancients did with their sick, exposing them on the steps of the temple so that every one who came to
invoke the Divinity might offer them a remedy.

And to this end, I will strive to reproduce thy condition faithfully, without discriminations; I will raise a
part of the veil that covers the evil, sacrificing to truth everything, even vanity itself, since, as thy son, I
am conscious that I also suffer from thy defects and weaknesses.

El filibusterimo

l Filibusterismo was written in dedication to the three martyred priests Mariano Gomez, Jose Burgos,
and Jacinto Zamora, whose deaths left an indelible mark in his mind.

Like Noli Me Tangere, Fili aims at enlightening the society, at bringing the Filipinos closer to the truth.
But whereas in the first novel, we are encouraged to ask and aspire for change and liberation, in this
novel, the society is urged to open its eyes to reality and rebel against the Spanish government for its
oppression and abuse.

In Noli, there is aspiration, beauty, romance, and mercy. In Fili, all the reader will feel is bitterness,
hatred, and antipathy. The romance and aspirations are gone. Even the characters' personalities seem to
have undergone radical change. This is how different Rizal's second novel is. Considering that both were
written by the same author, the plots are poles apart.
Outright scorn and bitterness may already be felt at the beginning of the story, where Simoun promotes
abuse and tyranny in the Spanish government, in the hope that the people will reach the limits of their
endurance and declare a revolution.

Simoun, who is actually Noli's Ibarra in disguise, conveys an entirely different personality in Fili. While
Ibarra is trusting, aspiring, and loving, Simoun is now cunningly careful in his dealings, distrusting, and
extremely bitter. Something changed in Rizal; and this is reflected in the personalities he gave his El
Filibusterismo characters.

To the memory of the priests, Don Mariano Gomez (85 years old), Don Jose Burgos (30 years old), and
Don Jacinto Zamora (35 years old). Executed in Bagumbayan Field on the 28th of February, 1872.

The Church, by refusing to degrade you, has placed in doubt the crime that has been imputed to you;
the Government, by surrounding your trials with mystery and shadows, causes the belief that there was
some error, committed in fatal moments; and all the Philippines, by worshiping your memory and calling
you martyrs, in no sense recognizes your culpability. In so far, therefore, as your complicity in the Cavite
mutiny is not clearly proved, as you may or may not have been patriots, and as you may or may not have
cherished sentiments for justice and for liberty, I have the right to dedicate my work to you as victims of
the evil which I undertake to combat. And while we wait expectantly upon Spain some day to restore
your good name and cease to be answerable for your death, let these pages serve as a tardy wreath of
dried leaves over your unknown tombs, and let it be understood that every one who without clear
proofs attacks your memory stains his hands in your blood!

THE YOUH IS THE HOPE OF OUR FUTURE

They say, today’s youth is different from the youths in the past. Is that the reason why
they are not giving these youth the proper education? Is this the reason why they are just
letting the youth of today to do what they want to do? Is that enough reason to neglect
what our National Hero had said? If we think that today’s youth is way more different than
the youth in the past, maybe we should think and mold our youth in a way that it’ll result
to a better youth, to a better country. Maybe the reason why our youth is different is
because we have our own shortcomings. Our shortcomings that will result to the youth’s
own shortcomings that will not result to progress.

Our youth will never be the fair hope of our motherland if we will not teach them, if we will
not mold them. Let’s treat our youth, the way Jose Rizal is treated, he had his first lesson
in their home and it is given by her mother. We should keep in mind, that without us it is
not possible for the youth to be the fair hope of the motherland, and without education we
will all be nothing.

Let’s see to it that the first lesson that the youth is going to learn will be learned at home.
Let’s teach the youth, before the world and our society teach them.

Is Rizal still relevant to the youth?

It is the 120th death anniversary of our national hero, Dr. Jose Rizal, who was executed in Bagumbayan
on December 30, 1896 by our Spanish colonizers and achieved what few Filipinos have achieved –
immortality. I'm sure our readers know a lot or just enough about our Rizal for he lived in an era where
love of country was something to fight for. It is perhaps the reason why he has been adopted as the first
Asian hero. Yes, his popularity has gone beyond the borders of the Philippines.

While I haven't yet been to Spain, I gathered that in Madrid, the Spaniards went out of their way to
honor Dr. Jose Rizal with a replica of his monument and his tomb at the Luneta placed in a strategic
location in Madrid. This, for me, is a sort of vindication of the heroism of Rizal by the very nation that
had him executed. My favorite quote from Rizal goes: "Where there are no tyrants, there can be no
slaves."

While Rizal was an ilustrado, a learned or intellectual person, who was a class on his own in his time, his
exile to faraway Dapitan in Western Mindanao gave him the opportunity to live in a part of the
Philippines that was poorly developed. More importantly, the people there did not speak his native
tongue, Tagalog. His exile gave him a rare glimpse of the rest of the country, that we were an
archipelago divided between ethnolinguistic lines. I'm sure his three-year exile afforded him to speak in
Cebuano.

So the question we ought to ask is whether Dr. Jose Rizal is still relevant to our youth today? After all,
Rizal said "the youth is the hope of the fatherland." In these times, we are in the crossroads of history
where we finally have a president in Rodrigo "Digong" Duterte who has made it his life's mission to forge
a dramatic shift from our present unitary form of government and into a parliamentary/federal form of
government, which is more suited to the archipelagic nature of the Philippines. If Malaysia, our
neighbor, has a federal system, why not the Philippines?

History will judge the last 70 years of the political history of this country under a unitary form of
government where the Filipino people increased in number, but the state of poverty has worsened.
Most politicians and economists pin the blame on our runaway population increase.
But in truth, the fault lies upon the fact and reality that the people whom we elect into positions of
power only tend to enrich themselves, thus denying the poor Filipinos many of their basic needs. Worse
of all, the ordinary Filipinos tend to idolize these supposedly public servants when the reality is they only
serve their vested political interests.

This is why my blood curls when the Office of the Ombudsman drags its feet in filing graft and corruption
cases against elected officials who misused government funds taken from the Priority Development
Assistance Fund and the Disbursement Acceleration Program. In my book, the new Philippines should
have no tolerance of corruption and laws should be enacted to speed up trial cases against those who
misuse the funds of the government. We want to see these crooks languish in jail!

Since this is our last column for the year 2016, we can only exhort the youth to become active in our
political way of life, not as puppets of politicians or joining leftist organizations to create chaos in our
streets but actively participating in debates like the up and coming ones about the pros and cons of
federalism. I'm already in my twilight years, having been a columnist for nearly 30 years, and allow me
to say that we need a new generation of Filipinos who can learn to love their country first before
themselves.

We do have the so-called "millennials," but they are just so engrossed with themselves, doing selfies and
uploading them on Facebook. If only we could harness that enthusiasm to create a better nation, I'm
sure we can build a better nation that can stand proud with the rest of the ASEAN and Asia.

So as we bid goodbye to the year 2016 and welcome the new year 2017, we can only hope and pray that
the Philippines would fare better than most nations in Asia. With the election of US President-elect
Donald Trump, who takes his oath of office on January 20, I'm sure we shall be seeing a lot of changes in
the way he runs the United States of America. For sure, it would take a lot of diplomatic finesse on the
part of President Duterte to have a balanced foreign policy with our neighbors, the People's Republic of
China, Japan, ASEAN, and the United States with which we have a military alliance.

Personally, I look forward to the year 2017 with a better vigor unlike the year 2016 where my medical
issues kept me from doing my work. Now that I'm on the road to recovery from my kidney transplant
operation, I hope to join and participate in educating our people on the benefits of federalism for this is
our golden opportunity to fix what is wrong with our nation.
Read more at https://www.philstar.com/the-freeman/opinion/2016/12/30/1658009/rizal-still-relevant-
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