When I saw facsimiles of the new bank notes celebrating our flora and fauna instead of our heroes and other historical figures, my first thought was, oh no, there goes Ninoy… which led to… susunod na kaya ang NAIA? Alam naman natin how hard they have tried to paint Ninoy as the bad guy and Marcos as the good guy in that historical drama of the mid-sixties to early eighties, and that there has long been a Marcos-loyalist call to change NAIA back to MIA, with “M” up for grabs, dahil di naman daw bayani si Ninoy samantalang you-know-who is now buried in LNMB.
My next thoughts were: whose idea was it kaya to remove images of our heroes. Bangko Sentral’s? PBBM’s? Maybe the prez wanted sana to put OG Ferdinand Marcos on the 500-peso bill to replace Ninoy & Cory but didn’t dare, so tinanggal na lang lahat ng heroes and other historical figures from all the bills?
A little history. Back in 1985 the then Central Bank’s New Design Series 1985-2019 featured Marcos on the 500-peso bill. But it was an iffy time for the dictatorship — the Sandiganbayan mock trial was in the process of acquitting Fabian Ver and 25 others in the military conspiracy to assassinate Ninoy, there were calls for his resignation in the parliament of the streets, and Reagan was urging him to hold elections and prove that he still had the people’s mandate. I imagine that Marcos decided not to release the bill until after the snap election of 1986, which he expected to win, but he was ousted instead some two weeks after. In 1987 the Central Bank issued instead a 500-peso bill with Ninoy Aquino’s image; this was replaced in 2010 with Ninoy & Cory.
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Bangko Sentral officials are quick to assure the public that the old bills with our heroes and other historical figures will continue to circulate but, I imagine, not for much longer, unless the prez comes to his senses and the next polymers bring them back. Calling attention to our rare and precious flora and fauna is good, but it’s not as if government itself really cares about them, di ba, considering the continuing denudation of what forests we have left to make way for mining and quarrying and solar farms and windmills and malls and golf courses?
In this fractured nation of ours, where we don’t even speak the same language, the one thing we share is the peso as currency and our heroes as exemplars of the best in the Filipino, and so many more of them deserve to be immortalized. Never mind the presidents, really, because none of them really measure up. Hindi nag-iisa si Makoy.