Hammer and Sickle for Beginners

AT home looking for a stick of Marlboro, my curiosity one day was roused when I entered the room of my elder brother Eric and saw instead a stack of documents in his closet and papers cluttered on the bedside table. I snooped closely and noticed the reading materials were mostly typed-written mimeographed papers with stylus-drawn hammer-and-sickle insignia with banners calling for the overthrow of this and that system or with illustrations of people with headbands, clenched fists and howling postures.

The year was 1983, I was in high school, and I knew from the news on TV and from some papers that there were demonstrations at the capital city opposing the more than ten years of military rule of the president. So I figured kuya must be one of those demonstrators who want to overthrow the president or he must have written those rebellious documents.

I learned later that Eric was neither a demonstrator nor a subversive writer. He was a youth organizer working incognito for a local underground Maoist group.

"Toka Atam Gawuh!!! Akab Ikam!!!" (foto lifted from philrevocouncil.org)

I eventually joined their secret society, marched countless demonstrations, chanted slogans and read voluminous literatures of Mao, Fidel, Lenin and Marx. Subsequently, my behavior, insight and beliefs were altered while my ways of mischief—especially drinking binges—were drastically cut down because of the group’s stern orders. (Funny however, after clandestine drinking sprees inside a similarly clandestine boarding house for activists, we kept empty Red Horse bottles safe and unseen inside the cabinet.)

The transformation proved to be precursors of the tedious process I would undertake to become—picture this—one grim, disciplined, non-drinking and devoted militant, a revolutionary unfettered by worldly desires to liberate the poor and put to death all money-making capitalist exploiters and oppressors in this unjust God-forsaken world.