A New Generation of Revolutionaries

Streaming from the Cities to the Countryside

AND THE MOST wonderful news of all:  Our daughter has joined the NPA! Only a month of integration with the masses and she has decided to devote all her time and effort to revolutionary work with the comrades and the masses in the countryside… From the tone of her letter to us, she had found her place in this complicated but beautiful world of ours.  The letter brims with a sense of confidence, vitality and fulfillment. And this we share with you.

“…I’m still surprised at how quickly my thinking has changed; how effortlessly I told myself that I no longer need a master’s degree so that I can be most effective as a cadre teaching [at the university]… this is related to some of the truths of which I  have become most keenly aware – that the need for cadres is indeed urgent, immediate in all aspects of the revolutionary movement; but that it is here in the countryside where this need is most urgent and cries for serious and programmed response.  I have grasped this and if I should return to reside in the city, I shall ever be tormented by what I have been awakened to in the countryside. …

“Only now has it become crystal clear to me why NGOs cannot be effective; only what my former classmate claims about being able to reach more people through a column in a bourgeois newspaper cannot also be effective; why it is only from among the bourgeoisie that Siglaya finds adherents, why long-term integration with the masses is extremely important for making us understand these truths…

“In fact, it is only now, here in the guerrilla zones, that I am truly and consciously remoulding myself… the redressing of all inequalities/errors has become real for me only now as I share the living conditions of the masses.  Participating in the armed struggle, I have come to realize why it is very  essential to cultivate discipline, initiative, diligence, humility, concern and love for comrades, the masses, class-friends (kaibigan sa uri) and the  natural environment… The city is no place for such remoulding, not just yet, not for me, not for Doni, nor Karlo and the rest of us who all have chosen this commitment rather than go full time in bourgeois-designed and dominated cradle…”

Once again, new blood is flowing into the countryside to give new vitality to the revolutionary movement!