History

I recently liked Ambeth Ocampo’s page on Facebook, sometime after the super typhoon. I stumbled upon it when I saw on the ticker that a friend from high school also liked him. It turns out I already have 11 friends who liked him. Yeah!!

We learned about him back in high school. He is a famous historian. That history show of Lourd’s shown in TV5 could easily be from his works.  He is also kind of the authority when it comes to Rizal and anything in the 19th century Philippines. We have read his book "Rizal Without The Overcoat" way back in 3rd year Filipino class  and it was never dull to read. I did not own the book of course, a classmate lend it to me. I had to return it several years after, around 2009 I think, really years after college because his sibling needs it.

The thing is, we are history buffs. Studying history is never boring for me; memorizing names, dates, events and places. Moreover, a lot could be learned from history in a political and social standpoint. It has to be one of my strongest subjects. My notebooks on social studies are full of notes. There was an old Philippine History book by Teodoro Agoncillo which from marking on the book shows it is from the library of Roosevelt College Marikina, Rizal. It was a really old book but I did read it when I was in 4th grade. I found public school textbooks to be insuffucient by that time.  I guess I craved for more that early.
The thing with history is it is written by people, people has biases too.Kim Jong-un wipes his uncle out of North Korea’s histoy; Daniel Tirona’s granddaughter in a Cheche Lazaro documentary denies his cowardly acts towards Bonifacio during the Tejeros convention.

Inspite of that, what’s important are the lessons we have to learn to prevent something bad to happen, we are humans and errors are meant to be made, and history will repeat itself. We need to learn on what history teaches us. Ambeth Ocampo had this column on Inquirer detailing Tacloban and the super typhoons it encountered in the past, in 1897 and 1912. Typhoons are normal and we experience it every year. It’s just that we never learn how to deal with it the right way and be prepared.