Time is a tyrant, and amnesia is its alibi.

We were not born when guns silently stopped. Not when bodies were still being pulled from roadsides. Not when families were still waiting for loved ones that would never come home.

We were yet to be conceived when one man stood before the nation, promised salvation, and picked its pockets instead.

However, we are here now. That is where the problem lies.

Time does not rob everything at once. It shrinks the horror down until it fits into a module, a reviewer, a quiz you answer and forget the moment you hand it. It is anesthesia, slow-drip. Ang tagal na noon. Move on even when it keeps taking until history becomes a footnote and the footnote becomes a blank space.

So we move on.

We grieve for people we never met. We forget what we were never taught. We carry a sorrow we cannot name and yet we are told to be grateful for it.

Magpasalamat ka na lang wala ka roon, they say—but do not ask how freedom was paid for. Honor the heroes—but do not ask why their lives had to be the cost. Move forward—but do not look back, do not dig deeper, do not ask the questions that make our elders turn away.

So we scroll. We may even chuckle at the jokes. We watch the edits call those years the "golden age" as if it does not hold up a mirror to the rusted reality of today. We mistake the algorithm for acknowledgement. For activism, when we fail to recognize the truth when it has always been buried within us every day.

Ignorance is not bliss—ignorance is privilege.

That is how it happens. Not one big lie. But a thousand little ones we never bothered to correct because we think time heals all.

They gave Marcos Sr. a hero's grave in the Libingan ng mga Bayani. A man who crowned himself. They let Jr. sit in Malacañang and say "golden age" again like the gold was never ours first. They call it unity, but unity on top of a lie is not unity. It is another complicity in plated armor.

X marks the spot. That is what every treasure map says. The real deal is not gold, but memory. Not jewels, but justice. And that is why they want the X gone, the map folded, the compass smashed.

A generation that cannot find that spot cannot dig. We cannot learn what was buried. Cannot demand back what was stolen. Cannot grieve what we refuse to name. And a nation that cannot name its wounds will keep bleeding quietly, mistaking numbness for healing.

We were not alive when Martial Law was declared, yet we are alive now. Alive enough to question. Alive enough to investigate. Alive enough to refuse the anesthesia. Being born after ML does not excuse us. In fact, it obligates us not to repeat history’s mistakes.

We are not too young to notice the map keeps changing whenever we get near the X.

We are losing the plot. The exact spot where the truth was buried.

Time will keep doing what tyrants do: blur, soften, erase. That is its nature. But amnesia? Amnesia is a choice.

So here is the map. Here is the X. Here is where they buried the truth and called it a hero's grave.

The question is not whether we were there. It is whether we keep digging—or let them say nothing was ever buried.

The Frontman