Overseas Filipino workers who build their families’ futures from thousands of miles away are among the heroes of the present age, President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. said, framing heroism not as something sealed inside old textbooks but as a spirit each generation reshapes through its own acts of duty and sacrifice.
Delivering his National Heroes Day message, the President placed OFWs alongside the teachers and health workers who keep communities running, the soldiers and police who stand watch, the firefighters and emergency responders who move toward danger, and the parents whose steady sacrifices hold households together — the people he described as the country’s modern-day heroes.
That circle of recognition, Marcos said, extends to those defending the nation’s stake in contested waters. He credited the Philippine Coast Guard, the Armed Forces of the Philippines, the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources, and the country’s fisherfolk with safeguarding Filipino livelihoods, rights, and interests across the West Philippine Sea.
National Heroes Day, observed on the last Monday of August, sets aside a day to honor both the celebrated and the unnamed Filipinos who resisted colonization and the struggles that followed.
According to the President, the examples he cited represent only a portion of what heroism looks like today — a spirit carried forward, he said, by ordinary Filipinos who choose to serve, to sacrifice, and to act for the good of others and the nation.
