Monday, 10 Oct 2022 Is UP Los Baños’ 104th Loyalty Day – I Will Not Attend, But I Will Be There!

The 1967 “Loyalty Day” celebration of the University of the Philippines College of Agriculture (UPCA) is the single most memorable event in my life connected to UPCA – except the day I was kicked out of UPCA as “Extreme Delinquent” student! (No details now.) Rather, let me talk about the day I discredited the purpose of Loyalty Day. A sad story, a glad story!

The theme of this year’s Loyalty Day is “Strengthening The Partnership Between UPLB And Alumni For More Progressive Communities.” That partnership was neither given importance nor mentioned in any Loyalty Day celebration on or before 1967.
(“104^th” image from mobile.twitter.com)

Loyalty Day 1967 was when I changed the nature of the celebration all by myself – Believe it or not!

It happened this way: Tuesday, 10 Oct 1967, I was already ready with copies of my open letter titled “What Did You Do In The War, Daddy?” It was purportedly an open letter to the unborn child of Frank & Amparo Hilario, our first. It was a labor of love – both the child and the open letter. Early morning, I was already at the Carabao Gate happily distributing copies to visitors walking or riding in – they were glad to be given each a copy:

Those UPCA alumni had no way of knowing what was inside the open letter – that it was, in more ways than one, condemning the very celebration of Loyalty Day!

In that open letter, my argument was in these exact words (from my own essay “Oblation Bleeding In UP Los Baños. Dis-Loyalty Day 10 October 2017,” 11 Oct 2017, Creative Thinkering, blogspot.com):

You are celebrating a day when you volunteered to fight in Europe with the Allies in a war in which the Philippines was not directly involved. Therefore, your loyalty was not to the Philippines but to America, because it was the US that founded UPCA, your school. You are intellectual slaves of the United States.

Horrors!

That was 1967. The next year, I was kicked out of UPCA silently – my appointment as “Substitute Horticulture Instructor” was notrenewed. I then applied to many of the state universities & colleges (SCUs) and Fr William Masterson, SJ, Dean of Xavier University College of Agriculture(XUCA), accepted this rebel. (Thanks to SCUs for keeping me hopeful.) Fr Masterson was perfect for me – he accepted my history as well as my emerging discipleship in Organic Agriculture (OA). And yes, Nicky Perlas, who later won a Right Livelihood Award, was one of my XUCA students & early believers in OA.

Years later, I realized 2 things:

Bad: I was wrong in condemning the UPCA volunteers because World War 1 would have engulfed the Philippines if it were not stopped in Europe.

Good: After my open letter, the alumni slowly changed the nature of Loyalty Day from celebrating the volunteerism for fighting a military war to volunteerism for fighting a civilian war – against poverty of the farmers, for one.

This is an extremely happy alumnus speaking!@517