This year’s celebration of National Heroes Day was notable for  two  reports about  our national heroes. One was the disclosure by Sen. Imee Marcos that we have no officially declared national  heroes because no  law  to this  effect has ever been enacted by Congress.  The last bill filed remains buried in the records of the House of Representatives Committee on Laws since 2017. The other report  was  about  a bill filed by Deputy Speaker and Surigao del Sur Rep. Johnny Pimentel seeking to rename Camp General Emilio  Aguinaldo, headquarters  of  the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) in Quezon City, to Camp General Antonio Luna. The discovery that we have never proclaimed any national hero  was  highly disappointing.  All along,  our school children have been taught about  Jose Rizal, Andres  Bonifacio,  Apolinario  Mabini, M. H. del Pilar, and all the other great men and women in our history.   All over the country, there are monuments to them. Towns and roads are named after them. Holidays honoring  them  have been proclaimed by presidents  and  approved by Congress,  but they were never officially acknowledged as national heroes. All the while, Senator  Marcos said, we have only  been honoring “implied heroes.” In 1995, the  Philippine National Heroes Committee  officially recommended  several people for the official designation of National Hero. The proposal got lost in debates among so many officials driven by  regional  interests who could  not reach any agreement on an official  list. A bill to proclaim Rizal was filed by Bohol Rep. Rene Relampagos  in 2014 – the one now buried in files of the House Committee  on Revision of Laws. This failure to agree on an official list of national heroes  may be due  to the regionalism that has held back national unity in all of our history. The Spaniards  and  the Americans who came after them found tribal groups who fought one another,  rather than one nation,  probably because of seas and mountains that separated  them. The Philippine Revolution  launched   by Bonifacio in Tondo, Manila, in 1896, was overtaken by military victories by Aguinaldo. The rivalry between the two leaders and their men  led to the killing of Bonifacio  by men identified with Aguinaldo on May 10, 1897, in Maragondon, Cavite. In the Philippine-American War that followed in 1902,  General  Luna of Binondo, Manila, was seen as a rising leader, making  use of guerrilla tactics that were  used  by later world leaders like China’s Mao Tse-tung and Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh. Luna was such a military leader that the American  officers he fought held him in high regard, one calling him ”the only general the Filipino army had”and another calling him “the ablest  and most aggressive leader of the Filipino republic.” Like Bonifacio, Luna was by killed by  men believed linked to Aguinaldo, but there is no such claim in our history books, only  persistent  stories and,  more recently, a film about the young general. That sore point has now been raised anew with Deputy Speaker Pimentel’s bill to rename Camp Aguinaldo to Camp Luna. As may be expected, Cavite Rep. Jesus Crispin Remulla has immediately opposed the bill. The new debate is now just beginning. We hope it will not lead to even greater divisions among our people.