Are we worth dying for?

When the late Senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino posed the rhetorical question  whether the Filipinos were worth dying for, no one for a  moment thought at that time  that he was predicting his own assassination that eventually led to the downfall of martial law President Ferdinand Marcos and the consequent restoration of constitutional democracy.

The late “Ninoy” did not wait for his question to be answered. As a matter of fact, from all accounts, he seemed to have thrown that question with a quizzical tone, unconvinced that yes, Filipinos are worth the supreme sacrifice.Today, many of us either are totally unaware of that milestone or have already left to the dustbin of history what those quizzical words signified.

As we now mark a commemorative milestone of his death  by an assassin’s bullet at the airport tarmac upon his return to Philippine soil from exile in the United States,  it may be good to ponder once more what that poser meant  to us as a nation and what we individually can contribute to hopefully approximate Ninoy’s estimation.
Indeed, are we really worth dying for?