It was perhaps the strangest thing that the Order of the Knights of Rizal ever did in its hundred years of existence.
 
On the eve of June 19,  2012,  the Knights organized a bloggers night to greet Jose Rizal on his Birthday. Though comprising only one-third of the guests, the bloggers lent an impactful presence by their modish attire (some still in their school uniforms); their rompous singing with Noel Cabangon, almost as rompous as the knights bellowing the Lupang hinirang; their questioning questions and their inquisitive, searching looks.
 

Different from the usual! Strange hype for the Knights?

From previously established statistics, it is calculated that today less than 10 percent of adults over 50 access or use Internet.  That explains why many of the elder knights are still not yet fully ‘comfortable’ in the digital age with ipads and laptops, email and social networking. Cel phones are for making phone calls or receiving them. Few knights have email or consult their emails or text messages using laptops or their celphone. The netiquette of acknowledging by a  simple ‘k’ or a ‘ttyl’ is unknown. Even less known are the abbreviations of sms language in English or Tagalog: c u l8r, mhal 2, hwag l8. But there is a cool and growing minority that is connected.

In contrast, however, a large majority of the youth are highly adept at manipulating cel phones, ipads, laptops and social networking. More than sixty percent of the age group 12 to 19 and young professionals use Internet daily. Internet has become their playground of interaction, finding and meeting friends, telling stories, listening to music and watching movies, even videos of music or human events. Among lower income families, students who can’t afford to purchase their own computer, avail of access time at internet cafes or share a friend’s laptop, using their own usb key. Some bypass the costly laptop and invest in the more expensive cel phones with 3G and WIFI and access internet as easily, with less cost. Their little cel phone also stores music, accesses  all newspapers and news blogs, TV programs and video clips.

So a bloggers nite  is not a bad idea, both for the knights to cross that digital divide, and for the young ones to enrich their digital playground with a deeper cultural and historical understanding of the heroes who forged nationhood out of several dozen ethnic tribes and liberated this country from Spain, and later from the US.

The purpose of this event was twofold: first, to encourage and support the bloggers around the archipelago to use their social networks to greet the national hero on his 151^st birthday; second,  to involve the knights more closely in the intricacies of social networking thus crossing the digital divide as a group.

Even singing the national anthem took on new meaning, as James Jimenez writes in his blog  Tiwarik the next day “Singing to the profoundly martial version of the march used by Gang Badoy’s RockEd video, the assembled Knights of Rizal quite literally shook the rafters of the Manila Yacht Club with their voices. I was, in that moment, transported. Suddenly, I wasn’t in the air-conditioned safety of a room with a bay view, I was in the middle of a band of marching men, hearts set aflame by love of motherland, loudly and proudly proclaiming their willingness to die rather than see Her trod upon ever again. . . If once – just once – you’ve had the chance to sing the Lupang Hinirang, with booming voices all around you, keeping time to war drums, you will understand what national anthems are supposed to do.”
 
To provide a backdrop for all this, Sir Reghis Romero II, KGCR, supreme commander presented a power point, showing the function of RA 646 as the enabling act that officializes the Knights of Rizal as a national partner in events honoring the national hero and inculcating his ideals in the youth of today, the leaders of tomorrow.  Several of the graduates of the Rizal Youth Leadership Institute have themselves becomes mayors, governors and business leaders. Sir reghis also emphasized the need to enter the social arena of the young and speak their language, thus he inaugurated the 2012 Rizal ikon, a modern pixilized image of Rizal, with the slogan and tweeter tag, #justlikerizal.
 

Undersecretary  of Health, Teodoro Herbosa, descendant of Rizal then took the floor.  He spoke simply and directly to the youth. “When I was young, it didn’t strike me that I was a descendant of Rizal. I am even named after his mother, Doña Teodoro Alonzo. Only later in my high school years did it dawn on me what a fine man he was and that I had one-sixteenth of his genes in my veins. I had to do something about that.”
 

 
Percy Cendaña, Commissioner at large of the National Youth Commission then spoke on the importance and organization of young people. The Sanggunian ng Kabataan has always been a strong partner in the organization of youth fora.




In order to demonstrate the life of the knights, the supreme commander called upon candidates for solemn induction.
 

The supreme commander then proceded to elevate Sir Reylan Viray to Knight Commander of Rizal for his several years of service to the Knights and especially to the RYLI youth fora.

When Noel Cabangon took the stage to sing his original compositions, the whole atmosphere evolved into a singing jazz night. The young audience listened in reverent silence to his patriotic songs, and romped to his ‘Pagkat ako’y Filipino,’ singling loudly with him and swaying with the tempo. The pontoons of the yacht club heaved and swung to the rhythm of the night.
 
 

After Bloggers Nite, certainly there is a change in the atmosphere.  The distance that kept the generations apart is now diminishing, little by little, while the tarnished medals of pomp and ceremony take on a new luster, having been tweeted and facebooked throughout the net.
 
 

Some of the tweets tweeted that night:
 
@nobodybutgrace and this is a surprise really. This is so nice.
@Renz Mar Velasco  And the crowd goes wild with Noel Cabangon's Ako'y Isang Pilipino
@Dean Jorge Bocobo ‏@SagadaSun  Noel Cabangon just rocked the Knights of Rizal
@TFilTeacher Rizal is relevant in today's time :-)
@nobodybutgrace  If Rizal is alive, he will be a blogger
 

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Read also the complementary story, James Jimenez, Asalto for Jose Rizal.(pdf format)
 

 

 

 

 

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