Gaerlan, Shalom Christian A. Atty.

Oyen Tanyag
Legal Philosophy 1E January 25, 2019

“LIWAY”
Having an ideal view of our country is nothing but a dream. We can fill our
realities with different kinds of imagination just to go through in our everyday lives.
Being imaginative and creative is great but nothing beats reality slapped into our
faces. Sometimes, we like stories because we like to consume the drama and enjoy
the feelings that we get from it, and this is dangerous. Because while we often
remember how we feel, we forget the circumstances that made us feel it.

The movie “Liway” depicts that stories are way of escaping reality. When you
are trapped in a prison camp, the only way to share images of reality are through
imagination and presenting such canvass to young minds explaining the real world in
a different perspective. During Martial Law, even though I don’t have a personal
experience since I was not yet born at that time, people were suffering tremendously
in the hands of the government. Actions, information and even ideology are
restricted. Ric’s action of telling the reality to the children, for me, is the only way in
which the future generation will understand what has been really going on in our
country. Through that side of the story, we can progress as a nation in which those
children can carry the teachings of their parents and having the idea of what their
parents really went through. The choice of Kip shall determine the future of our
country. It is a representation of that young generation who had experienced Martial
Law on how to move forward. This movie really shows the price of our freedom today
at the cost of the people that have suffered during Martial Law.

With all of this in consideration, we must now ask ourselves this question, Are
we going to rewrite the history and forget what really happened during that time or
are we going to accept facts and move forward? We must learn our mistakes as a
nation and try to avoid such thing from happening again. As a law student, we know
the capabilities of the President to lead our nation but that doesn’t mean that his
powers are unlimited that’s why we have checks and balances to keep things in
check. I hope in the near future that we will not be consumed by different sides or
colors or even “fake news” which will lead our people to believe such lies. We need
to be informed and educated enough to determine what is right and wrong.

“The people have realized that Martial Law is not law. A regime not
established by law is devoid of the attribute to dispense law. A regime which puts in
a bunker the highest law in the land does not have the moral authority to say that
nobody is above the law.” ― Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, If I Am Assassinated