by: John L. Silva

When disheartened friends predict acquittal for the embattled president, when people shun the newspapers and television to escape from it all, when hopelessness becomes seductively fashionable, I pull out this crinkled sepia-toned Newspaper and gaze at it long and hard. It brings me back to the day when I was the proudest Filipino on earth.

Imagine my country: no longer an itty-bitty page 12 news item about another bus driving off a cliff, or another typhoon, or another kidnapping. Our disaster-prone country summed up in 20 words or less and read by New Yorkers once a month.

That is, until those heady days in February when the  Philippines landed on the front page, right below the masthead, with headlines bigger than all the news items published about the country in a whole year.

That cold morning, I sprinted over to the corner Korean deli  to pick up The New York Times. Seeing me, the owner leapt  over the counter, handed me the paper, wouldn't take my money and embraced me, crying for our happiness and hoping his people would have the same good fortune one day.

I hailed a cab and the driver was Haitian and he could see my beaming happy face through his rear view mirror. He figured me out by the way I clutched the newspaper to my heart, more than a valentine, more than the Ten Commandments. I was holding my passport to go home again.

I gave the driver a high five congratulating him and his people for having kicked out their dictator Duvalier two weeks earlier. He gave me the same beaming smile and turned up his taped reggae to full blast as the cab shimmied uptown to the Philippine Consulate on Fifth Avenue.

The Consulate was now "ours", despite the portrait gaze of the fairy tale First Couple on the wall and the lingering smell of adobo and cigarette smoke in the trapped venal air. The Filipino thugs with the dark glasses who photographed us picketing the consulate days earlier, who jeered us and threatened to make relatives back home disappear, were packing their gym bags. After asking for our forgiveness, they made a mousy rear exit.

Outside, a crowd of Filipinos had gathered: New Jersey doctors, Brooklyn nurses, midtown bookkeepers, Park Avenue nannies, forgotten exiles, homesick students, and chunky American men married to petite Filipinas. me looked stunned, many laughed and cried alternately, others gazed upwards, beyond the concrete canyon, beyond the cloudless brilliant sky, to the heavens.

Pentel pens and cartolinas appeared. I wrote on mine, in big letters, "THE BASTARD IS GONE" and draped it on my chest and followed a line of people on one sidewalk singing the National Anthem lustily. Cars and busses honked loud and long and thumbs-up stuck out of windows. Unknown newsmen dropped their attaché cases and hugged us. Messengers jumped their bikes and break-danced with nurses. Japanese tourists posed for pictures in front of the Consulate. Fifth Avenue became a barrage of merry honking, cathartic yelps, and impromptu dancing. It was the day that had been dreamt and hoped and prayed for.

Having this sepia newspaper may be the automatic reflex of a collector keen on its resale value. But there were many other people at that day's end who kept their newspaper, encased it lovingly in plastic, and stored it some place safe and dry. Not for resale. But to remember a day when our people forsook being ciphers in a mandated universe of suffering, and boldly charted a new beginning. To remember when it was the proudest day to be a Filipino away from the homeland.

To remember a day when hopelessness was not in the vocabulary of a worthy and decent people.