Lost in bits and pieces.

(From Philippine Daily Inquirer)

Byline: Ambeth R. Ocampo

ROUSED from sleep at 3 a.m. by text and calls regarding a new coup attempt in Makati, I sat in front of the TV and got a ringside seat to history as it unfolded. However, an hour of watching, shifting channels more than usual, I started to wonder whether we were getting bits and pieces rather than the whole picture. The crew of various TV stations caught the efficient men in military uniforms calmly planting bombs in the Glorietta carpark. Naturally, the scene brought back memories of previous coup attempts during the term of Cory Aquino, but this turned out to be something else.

To the uninitiated, military uniforms look alike, and it was disappointing that none of the TV reporters were industrious enough to try and make distinctions between the name patches, insignia, etc. Without intelligent commentary, viewers for awhile were just as clueless as the reporters. Then they noticed the armbands and proceeded to describe what we could already see on video footage. I presume the redundance was for the radio audience who could only hear and not see what was going on.

So the bands were red, had a white sun on which was emblazoned the letter "I." It took awhile for somebody to guess that this was not a letter "H" either but the pre-colonial Philippine symbol for "Ka."

Despite being standard textbook information, something simple you get asked in elimination rounds at TV game shows, it took awhile for TV reporters to connect the armbands to one of the flags of the Philippine Revolution of 1896. Maybe I expect too much but I would like to believe that Filipinos do not need a Ph.D. in history to know that this armband was based on the Katipunan flag, that the letter on the sun is from the pre-colonial Philippine syllabary or baybayin, not alibata, which is a 20th-century invented word and does not exist in early Philippine dictionaries.

During the 1998 Philippine Centennial, these flags dominated the landscape forming part of a set mistakenly described as "Evolution of the Philippine Flag." We can partly blame the Philippine Post for miseducating the public with a series of stamps showcasing the different flags of the revolution and calling it the evolution of our flag.