By Eric S. Caruncho, Staff Writer
Sunday Inquirer Magazine
PEOPLE now talk about martial law as a dark period in the distant past when our democratic rights were taken away from us by a repressive totalitarian regime. Soldiers came in the night to round up activists, opposition politicians and anyone who might pose a threat to the new order and threw them in jail. The free media was shut down, and the only information came from the regime’s mouthpieces in the controlled press.
I didn’t care about any of that, at least not at the time. Martial law’s impact on me was more direct, and more personal.
I was a high school senior in September of 1972, and adhered to that wing of the youth culture that supposedly subscribed to the unholy trinity of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll (well, two out of three ain’t bad). Like most of my peers, I wore my hair down to my shoulders. In fact, I hadn’t had a haircut in two years.
Hair was a big thing then. It clearly indicated where you were on the social conformity spectrum: the longer it was, the less likely you were to adhere to the time-honored values of established society. Or so it seemed.
Not that we were hippies, God forbid! Even then, hippie was old hat. The peace and love rhetoric of the Woodstock generation never really caught on with us. We were privileged middle-class kids living with our parents, getting good grades in school, spending our pocket money on drugs, and looking forward to getting into the colleges of our choice, where we would enroll in courses like Industrial Engineering or Pre-Med that would give us an edge in the rat race to come.
The hair was just a fashion statement. But at age 16, 17, fashion statements were taken very seriously indeed.
So martial law hit us where we lived when newspaper photos started appearing showing the military stopping jeepneys, rounding up longhairs and giving them impromptu haircuts, in the name of the “New Society”.
It wasn’t so much the threat of military thugs violating our civil rights that terrified and enraged us; it was the thought that without our hair we would be revealed for what we were — just normal average kids like everyone else.
In any case, panicked by the media reports, my father decided to take pre-emptive action. He dragged me to this barbershop and forced me to submit to my first haircut in two years.
When school reopened, we all had a good laugh. I wasn’t the only longhair who had gotten a haircut in the interim.
It was really the end of an era, but we wouldn’t realize that until much later.
For more tangled tales and other hairy stories, check out the April 20 issue of the Sunday Inquirer Magazine.
October 3rd, 2008 at 4:54 am
thank you very much for your piece, man,you have resurrected our glorious past suddenly cut by that dictator- evil Marcos. I too have that Jimi Hiendrix experience of the evils of Martial Law. I thought long hair would be a thing of the past, now its the “in” thing, probably you mean that the “end of an era” refers to long hair, have you not noticed, young people are proudly displaying long hair? me too (I’m in my early 50’s) is letting my hair grow long, but the problem is, i am working in the Court, have been reprimanded to cut my hair by a judge, and that’s for me, an end of an era.