Eighty-four years after the Fall of Bataan, we still pause for “Araw ng Kagitingan.” There are sacrifices so costly, losses so great, that a nation diminishes itself when it forgets them.
But remembrance cannot be the only inheritance.
The years since Bataan were not empty of courage. This country still produces men and women who stood their ground in crises of their own time. My own grandfather was a veteran. For me, “Araw ng Kagitingan” is also family, memory and debt. That is why the day asks a harder question: if sacrifice gave us a nation, what have we done with it?
In difficult times, many of us have grown harder. We become impatient and more willing to look away. We begin to treat one another less as fellow citizens and more as interruptions to our own getting by. That may be understandable, but we cannot remain there. If hardship empties not only our pockets but our regard for one another, something larger is also being lost.
Perhaps the courage required now is not only the courage to endure, but the courage to remain human through hardship.
That courage may be as ordinary as refusing to keep what is not yours. Recently, a passenger declined his change after paying far more than the usual jeepney fare, a gesture to help a driver through punishing fuel prices. Another told of a driver offering free rides to students, dialysis patients and patients on their way to treatment. These are not spectacles, but small, sincere acts of burden-sharing.
In my family, that detail lands not as an anecdote but as a memory: my father was a dialysis patient and when I could not drive him myself, my mother would book a ride. That is why such gestures do not feel small. When treatment is necessary, even transport can become part of the burden, or part of the mercy.
But courage is not only kindness. Sometimes it is discipline: stopping only at designated stops instead of in the middle of the road, where convenience for one becomes congestion for many; following rules, doing one’s duty, refusing the shortcut and bearing small inconvenience. Sometimes it looks like restraint.
If we hope to normalize courage, we must resist its performative versions. It is easy to confuse visibility with virtue. We see it in concern that arrives with cameras but disappears with the crowd, in gestures calibrated to be seen rather than sacrifices willing to be borne. True courage is rarely cost-free and almost never self-advertising.
The threats before us may no longer come in the form of invasion or war, but they are corrosive all the same: indifference, dishonesty, convenience over duty, performative patriotism and disinformation. They may not look like the ordeals of history, but they can still hollow out a nation from within. What a nation remembers once a year, it ought to practice every day.
We cannot know exactly what passed through the minds of those who sacrificed 84 years ago, what fears they carried, what doubts they wrestled with, or what hopes they held on to as they endured. But I would like to think they did not go through that only so we could inherit a country.
Perhaps they also hoped we would help make it better, more truthful, more humane and more worthy of the place we call ours. Eighty-four years later, a driver offers a free ride to a patient on the way to treatment. That is not a lesser courage. It is the same courage, translated.
To remember them well, then, is not only to thank them for what they carried, but to practice that courage, and to refuse the small corruptions that we keep excusing, in whatever ordinary form the moment now asks of us.