Our country was born through the blood and sacrifices of fraternity members.
The Katipunan was envisioned as a frat, called brotherhood at the time, with Bonifacio — the Supreme Leader — entailing sacrifices and millenarian practices for acceptance and leadership even at the time of his death at the hands of his own “brothers,” or fratmates if we are to call them now.
Frats have served the country well during dire straits.
The RAM stood up against Marcos when this brotherhood of soldiers realized he had gone too far. The Magdalo banded together to demand Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s ouster. Many university frat members have joined the underground under a testy political situation with many of them sacrificing their lives for their causes.
Each Filipino family has a relative in a fraternity. Each province or region has its own amalgamation of brotherhoods and sisterhoods, called sororities. Majority of communities have them. The Catholic church has several confraternities and is open about it.
Even our jails have several of them, and some have extended operations outside of the penal system, many of them have transformed into gangs with criminal operations that authorities are finding them hard to subdue.
No school, college or university is frat-free.
From the Katipunan, Philippine fraternities have evolved more than a thousand times, even faster than our country and its people did.
It’s the same with fraternities and sororities from other countries, but our own have taken various forms and identities that some of them could no longer be distinguished from their mom and pop frats.
All of them share a characteristic that did not deviate from old practices of their past: their involvement in, if we are not inclined to call it propensity for violence that also defines the Filipino culture of machismo.
But it’s more than that, actually.
Fraternities offer solace and protection. They offer acceptance and support. Many of them are brotherhoods, indeed.
I did not join one, but am friends with many who are in them.
No, they are not thugs, nor did they act like they were in their youth.
Frat members are normal people, like me and you and the person next to you.
But I see them as people with a longing, or maybe I am wrong.
There is something in the Filipino psyche that draws him into joining a group, or a frat, or a sorority.
Each recruit, I believe, is not totally unaware of what he is to face to be able to join a fraternity — the possibility of being subjected to hazing among them.
Marc Andre Hervias Marcos, a young law student at San Beda was the latest victim of death by hazing. His death put the San Beda Law School in the newspapers’ front pages anew as he became the second Bedan in just five months to die due to the now illegal practice of hazing.
Another Bedan law student, Marvin Reglos, was also killed while undergoing initiation rites by another fraternity last February.
They were neophytes. Neophytes are the lowest in the totem poles of frats. They are the plebeians, the bag-totters and errand boys. They are the first in the frontline during frat wars. They are the soldiers of the colony, the first of the gang to die if need be.
No neophyte is not ready for such an event. He joins a frat and is ready for any event that would come his way: Frat wars, even hazing death, or his being subjected to various forms of physical abuse and he is willing to take them all.
Very few neophytes have “chickened out” during their initiation rites. The number of hazing deaths, however, have failed to arrest recruitments by these groups.
Even with San Beda issuing a ban on fraternities following the death of Reglos, Marcos’ death only showed this order went unheeded.
The Aquila Legis hazing death of Leny Villa which now seemed to have happened eons ago had resulted in the creation of Republic Act 8049. What is now popularly known as the Anti-Hazing Law has teeth against fraternity hazing and violence, but how come there seems no decrease in the recruitment of young bloods and the formation of new frats to rivals those of their grandpops?
Fraternities are as old as the world. And their acceptance of violent practices as a form and proof of loyalty will stay.
It will take us eons to change this kind of peer culture. Or maybe we may have failed already.