Blurb: Many lawmakers agree national symbols are important but changing it isn’t.

For the last seven years, I’ve been running what could best be described as an "underground" crusade to restore the Maya as the Philippines national bird. I’ve gone to friends in the Senate and the Lower House with my treatise but while many of them agree it’s important and promised to support it, most everyone also agrees there are much more pressing matters which take priority in legislation.

Just how important is a national symbol? History is replete with many which sparked many a crusade, and lead they did, since they were most often in the van, head of the column, leading edge of the flying wedge: like the dragonheads of the Viking long ships which discovered America long before Columbus; the Cross of the Crusaders who fought to win back the Holy Land for Christendom; the Crescent which led Saladin and His Holy Warriors to spread Islam over most of the civilized world; the Dragon of China; the Bear of Russia; and for most of this young century and the last, the Bald Eagle of the United States of America.

Which must have piqued Fidel Ramos so much he moved Heaven and Earth (that’s the Upper and Lower Chambers of Congress, folks!) to replace the homely Maya of the rice fields with the Philippines fast-vanishing predator, the Philippine Eagle (hastily renamed as befitting a national bird, kasi naman how would Monkey-Eating Eagle sound as a national bird? Holy Smokes! Tabako must have exclaimed.

So began my crusade during the centennial of Philippine Independence in 1998. Many of the people I talked to agreed with my case for restoring the Maya as the country’s national bird but would invariable end with : "But we have more pressing matters to attend to!"

There’s never been a pressing moment than the present for such changes because symbols, especially national ones, are a barometer of the national psyche: take a look at the US Bald Eagle with its aggressive stance, befitting of the last remaining superpower on Earth, bullying the whole civilized world over the alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in Iraq; the Russian Bear, scaled down now from its Soviet forebears but certainly not lacking in teeth and claws to bully its fellow nations and satellites of the Russian Confederation like in Chechnya; and the Imperial British Lion, fast sinking into the abyss of oblivion as the glory and splendor of its empire where the sun never set fades to black with a little help from Tony Blair.

Honorable Senators and Representatives of the Philippine Congress, not one of you I believe would like to see the country going the way of the Philippine Eagle: his solitary home savaged by depredations of man’s greed; his children hunted to extinction by thrill seekers making sport of the nation’s patrimony; his future in the hands of warlords in whose fiefs he uncertainly ponders whether he finds refuge or imprisonment.

Rather, let the Filipinos and citizens of the world recall the Maya to mind when they think of the Pinoy: small, hardy yet ever merry and in the company of his kind; surviving in the forest, mines, cities and highways of men where the great Eagles and Falcons find certain destruction.

No time like now to rescind Tabako’s EO, fellas. Let’s bring back the Maya as the Filipino National Bird. Because it is a national symbol that truly befits the Filipino and reflective of his creed and ideals, and not a pathetic copycat of a former colonial master, and ironically, whose only excuse for being so is to help him survive his changing country.