I BELONG to a special generation, who grew up during the dark episode of Philippine history. As children, we were being raised under the illusion of peace and bliss against the backdrop of the dictator’s “New Society” campaign.

We were called “martial law babies.” We had no idea what life was like before Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law, infamously known as “Proclamation 1081,” exactly 40 years ago today.

Though we had no recollection of that day, we remember the curious little things, stern warnings from our parents, hushed conversations about our missing neighbors and the suspension of writ of habeas corpus, which was way beyond the comprehension of my young mind. “Don’t ask questions; don’t say anything; don’t talk to strangers,” my father would always remind us each time we left our house.

The government-run media fed us with frivolous news, entertained us with B-movies and beauty pageants. They warned us of a story about an irreverent TV host who, according to an urban legend, was punished and ordered to bike around the military camp for mocking the New Society slogan, “Sa Ikauunlad ng Bayan, Displina ang Kailangan” (For the Progress of the Nation, Discipline is What We Need).

The much-ballyhooed discipline drummed up by the tyrannical regime turned out to be a shroud that concealed the nightmare of fascism. The dreadful shroud that covered the political oppression, indiscriminate torturing and killing of the activists or suspected activists and looting by the Marcoses and his cronies was eventually unveiled by the so-called “mosquito press.” Underground journalists, who were fortunate enough to elude the military dragnet after the martial law proclamation, secretly regrouped to publish and distribute alternative newspapers that said it all. My father would carefully stash these papers as if they were illegal contraband.

“The New Society dictatorship did not reform society, as Marcos promised, but worsened its ugliest features,” wrote Manuel Almario, who was one of the journalists arrested and detained immediately after the proclamation of martial law, and spokesperson of the Movement for Truth in History.

“The dictatorship strengthened the economic and social oligarchy, widened the gap between rich and poor, and deepened corruption, cronyism and foreign dependency,” Almario wrote in the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

The Filipino people have yet to recover the $640 billion plundered by the kleptocrats. Imelda Marcos continues to display her shameless profligacy. The Marcoses are back in power because the Filipinos did not do what the Romanians did to the Ceausescus.

Almario noted, sadly, that the continued violations of human rights and the impunity of authority is an enduring legacy until today.

My generation has a challenging place in history. We grew up in fear and grew out of it. We have assumed by default a confusing role to educate the succeeding generation about the concept of freedom and democracy we didn’t fully live and understand.

Many of us have since left the country, saddled with guilt and a conflicted sense of patriotism, but we have not reneged on our duty to warn our children and tell the next generation what they need to know.

“Don’t trust the liars and the bullies,” wrote a colleague, Benjamin Pimentel, a San Francisco-based Filipino journalist. “Democracy can be messy and chaotic. But the alternatives are even messier. They create a false, deceptive sense of peace and order.”

Never again.