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Our National Hero?
WHO SHOULD really be our National Hero? We have often heard this question, or have even joined in raising it. Anyone who really has a deep sense of history would be careful not to simplistically, much less emotionally, choose between Jose Rizal and Andres Bonifacio to answer this question. The question is not a valid one to ask; it has been divisive since its inception.
The Americans, who told us in the early 1900s that we needed to have a national hero, do not have one up to now. And therefore they see no need to quarrel over the comparative merits of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and Lincoln, whom they call and venerate as, collectively, their “Founding Fathers.”
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But the U.S. government with its colonial intentions saw value in keeping the Filipino people divided among ourselves over a lot of things. On this specific question they really succeeded and To answer the question is to perpetuate this useless divisiveness. It falls within the intellectual tendency, strong among westerners, to dissect things and overproject particles and individuals, as opposed to the oriental and more spiritual predisposition to focus more on the integration of things.
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Rizal and Bonifacio both led and shone in different periods of our history. Each one of them responded to a specific set of socio-political circumstances that differed from that addressed by the other. And the response of one in his own time and circumstance cannot be fairly compared to the response of the other to the latter's own challenging circumstances.
And there isn’t even any real need to compare them. Bonifacio really learned a lot from the writings of Rizal, Plaridel and the others, but integrated them appropriately and creatively with his own studies of indigenous pre-Spanish philosophies and the great tradition of Hermano Pule's Cofradia.
Bonifacio was responding well to challenges that had to be faced in his own time in our history, quite different from the challenges that had to be faced by Rizal. So why compare them?
Or why compare only them? We have Apolinario Mabini, Emilio Jacinto, Marcelo del Pilar, Graciano Lopez Jaena, Tandang Sora, Gregoria de Jesus, Antonio Luna, to name only a few more, and they are all national heroes and heroines in their own right, whose heroism was given the opportunity to be fulfilled and made known to us due to the heroic efforts of countless other Filipinos now unknown to us.
Lapu-Lapu did not single-handedly repulse the Spanish invasion force the way the biblical David faced Goliath alone in combat. It was a collective victory won by our ancestors steeped in the synergetic spirit of bayanihan. It was only the history book writers, like the sensational mass media, that plucked out certain names to be projected as bida, leaving the rest to be forgotten as a “cast of a thousand extras.”
We should avoid putting our national heroes on top of unreachable pedestals, separated from their overlapping respective teams. Plucking out names to be projected as superstars has had a divisive effect all these decades and centuries! We have thus downgraded millions of real heroes and heroines, including our own ancestors and even ourselves, just because their names have not been mentioned in history books! Really, we have long been, and still are, a whole nation of heroes!
“Who is really our national hero, Rizal or Bonifacio?” Both, and a whole lot more! 
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