Everything We Never Had: List 9

Francisco is enjoying a drink along the wall as he watches the couples dancing to the band’s rendition of “After You’ve Gone.”

The banging reverberates through the building as he steps back, and the dance hall takes a collective breath.

The white men shift as if to pounce.

There’s no way this will resolve peacefully.

In the next breath, the dam breaks, and the crowd surges forward.

Francisco freezes at the horrible tableau unfurling under the streetlamps, the gangs of men beating his brothers.

Shouts of pain, cries for help, whoops of joy, and peals of cruel laughter fill the air as wood and metal crack bone and flesh.

After the discussion in their bunkhouse dies down and everyone disperses— nobody having persuaded anyone else from their initial position—he pulls Lorenzo aside.

When they return the next morning, Francisco listens to their stories of the white boys and white men who eventually showed up at the dance hall with makeshift weapons as sharp and hard as their white-hot anger, “concerned citizens” doing their own dance.

Of the Chinese grocer and a few other store owners who ushered fleeing Filipinos in from the street so they could hide in their rafters or back rooms while most of the town drew curtains closed and locked doors until the early morning, when the police gently dispersed the remaining “vigilantes” as if they were rambunctious children who’d gotten a bit out of hand.

After strategizing a circuitous route back—which includes passing a handful of points where some of their countrymen will be lying in wait to help them out if need be—they kiss the women goodbye, make the sign of the cross over their hearts, and leave.

But since having been attacked once does not mean they will not be attacked again by another group, they retreat into a nearby copse of trees to spend the rest of the night out of sight.

As Francisco holds his hands over his face, eyes shut tight against the tears, consolations come in snatches of Visayan and Ilokano and English.

That his last thoughts were not of this lonely, migratory life—so different from what they’d all imagined when they left the islands—and not of greedy gambling house proprietors or stingy growers or thieving contractors or angry white mobs.

The colonizers and the contractors, the recruiters and the thieves, the growers and the gangsters, the bankers and the bootleggers, the pimps and the police and the politicians.

Enzo lets the curtains fall closed and is about to return to the couch when he hears the low murmur of his dad’s voice on the other side of the glass.

“It’s weakness, Christopher. Your coddling isn’t preparing him for real life. Softness doesn’t survive this world.”

Enzo imagines Lolo Emil wincing as he says the last word.

“It’s in Palawan. Back in the seventies, Marcos kicked out hundreds of Indigenous people whose ancestors had lived there since time immemorial. Then he illegally bought a bunch of African animals—giraffes, zebras, gazelles, and so on—and shipped them to Calauit. It became the Marcos family’s own private safari park.”

“Sure was. And after the People Power Revolution ousted Marcos in ’86, it didn’t get much better.

Plus the Tagbanua —the people indigenous to the island—kept trying to reclaim the land by sabotaging the park and hunting the animals.

The Philippine government didn’t like that and would kill the Tagbanua in retribution.

The expected increase in poaching and deforestation and illegal mining, particularly in the Global South.

The author concludes by cautioning their readers not to get too caught up with the feel-good viral posts declaring that nature has been restored but also not to wallow in the despair of the very real negative consequences.

At the end of the article is another standalone quote from Aldo Leopold: “We shall never achieve harmony with the land, any more than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations, the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.”