If Bonifacio Had Twitter

Yesterday, I was watching the funeral procession of the late President Cory Aquino with the matching tears occasionally stinging my eyes. For the past five days, people have said and written nothing but beautiful and admirable things for the former President that it almost seemed like she was poised on a pedestal. News anchor were touting the event as a repeat of Ninoy’s funeral back in 1983, as a momentous occasion in history.

I continued to watch a little bit longer until there was really nothing to see except the flatbed truck bearing her coffin struggling to move past a sea of people so I decided to go online to check my email and Facebook accounts.

I scanned through the updates of my friends on my “Home” page and almost everyone had a status shoutout about President Aquino’s passing. I continued to read one status update after another when an interesting shoutout caught my eye. It was from my cousin who works for the news department of one of the major television networks in the country. His update said “Am tweeting from inside the Aquino family coaster.”

What he said gave me my first light-hearted moment of the day and somehow brought me back to earth. Reading history books have somewhat made historical figures seem like distant marble statues. People easily forget they were human all because their stories are told in a seemingly cold manner devoid of emotion. For instance, people look up to our heroes of old like Graciano Lopez Jaena, Gregorio del Pilar and Andres Bonifacio yet they disregard the fact that they had certain quirks. That’s why I look forward to Ambeth Ocampo’s columns in the Philippine Daily Inquirer because they paint our heroes in a more realistic, much warmer light – like, for instance, when Ocampo wrote about Del Pilar having loads of girlfriends, Bonifacio being rumored to have a love child and Lopez Jaena having only one coat which smelled because he would often use it to wipe his hands after eating sardines using his fingers.

Technology has somewhat made it easier for us to look back through history and remember our country’s movers and shakers as people who made mistakes, had particular peeves and loved to make liver pate. We do not have to confine ourselves to mere stories. Colored pictures refresh our memories, videos help us relive moments and Twitter and Facebook practically preserve what we felt like at a particular point in time - no matter how much of a fan we sound like.