By: Telly Gonzaga-Ocampo
JACK AND JILL ON WINDY HILLS
In this impeachment season, the past and the present sit at the same table.
My friend Inday from Tacloban and I have been comparing notes again. We often do this because we are a curious group, the kind that still remembers which newspaper came first on a given morning. Ours was formed in the martial law years, when the only dailies you could reliably find were the Manila Bulletin and the Philippine Daily Express. The Philippine Daily Inquirer arrived later, after August 21, after Ninoy Aquino was assassinated on the tarmac of what was then the Manila International Airport.
That was a different kind of news cycle. No viral clips. No algorithm. Just paper, radio, and the television set that everyone in the neighborhood gathered around. Today the screen is smaller and the noise is louder. But some songs still find their way in.
The nursery rhyme we never forget
Inday and I keep coming back to a childhood rhyme:
“Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after.”
As a kid it was just rhythm. Now it sounds different. Mura ug mohaom sa nahitabo karon. It feels like it fits what’s happening now. I started thinking about the image itself. A well on top of a hill. Wa may atabay tongtong sa bato. Wells are usually down below, on a flat ground, where the water gathers. Yet here we are, as a people, being drawn to a deep abyss that someone built on a hilltop.
During martial law we had a phrase for being tricked: na-Jack and Jill ta. It meant we were fooled, confused, led up and then dropped. And this term feels useful again.
We remember the television moment, the conditional threat made by the Vice President against three figures: the President, the First Lady, and the then Speaker of the House. We remember the questions that followed and the ones that didn’t. Why, for example, was there no immediate investigation of Mayor Benjamin Magalong’s statement that 90 percent of congressmen are contractors? Does it really take an IT expert to trace that?
Questions hang in the air the way they did in the 70s, except now they compete with a thousand other posts.
The Windy hills and loud postures
In our town, we have another phrase: windy hills. It means hambugero representing all bluster, no weight.
“I got turned off by some of the statements coming from university experts from Ateneo and UP,” my friend Inday admitted. Tinood bitaw, mura gyud ug windy hills?
Then Inday mentioned impeachment court and Atty. Sheila Dizon, a cum laude from San Sebastian, who opened with no flourish. Straightforward. Wa magbungabunga. Where, then, were the loudest academic voices?
This realization brought me back to my first days at UP Tacloban. A full professor would declare, with absolute certainty that there are only two universities in the Philippines – the University of the Philippines and the others.
I belong to the “others” and still, modesty aside, I left a dent. I designed the accountancy curriculum for our university, with a special track for government accounting and auditing. That was during the time of Chairman Francisco Tantuico of the Commission on Audit. Those two subjects later found their way into the CPA board exams.
Maybe now we need windy hills again, but only if they are rooted in truth. Look at the lawyers in court, my friend Inday said. Postura to the max. Some wore the terno where it did not belong. It really did not sit right.
Memory, loss, and the music that carried us
Our group has thinned. One friend was lost during the Yolanda rage, Her body was never found. The eldest among us passed away in the early 2000s. But we carry all of them into every conversation about the country.
For example, I did not like what happened to Marcoleta when ABS-CBN was closed. I was angry, then. In the depth of our despair during the pandemic, the ABS-CBN Mass woke us up to a new day. It was a small light, and we needed it. So where does that leave us?
So, dili ta magpa-Jack and Jill. People of the Philippines, dili gyud ta magpa-Jack and Jill. We should not let ourselves be led up a hill only to fall.
But there are times, Inday said, when we do need to be on windy hills. Basta tinuod lang ang atong isulti. As long as it is true. As long as the bluster serves something larger than ego: accountability, memory, repair.
People of the Philippines, “Cultural Heritage” is not only about dances and old houses. It is also about the language we use to describe the power behind:
- Jack and Jill
- and the Windy hills
- and the newspapers we grew up with
- and the professor who drew a line between UP and “others”
- and most of all, the mass on television during a pandemic, including the friend we lost to a storm.
These are the markers we pass down. They help us name what is happening, and they help us refuse to be fooled twice.
