The Philippine Online Chronicles

In the context of our political reality and amidst our blackest night, does it mean so little this EDSA?  Do we even understand what the spirit of EDSA is?

Twenty-four years seem like a lifetime ago.   It was the year that Brain was unleashed upon the world and it became the first PC Virus.  Challenger took to the sky and she burned like a shooting star killing seven brave astronauts and one schoolteacher.  A few days after that disaster in the sky, Pixar Animation Studios was born.  It was also the year when Fidel Ramos and Juan Ponce Enrile initiated events that would lead to the bloodless toppling of a dictator.

It is easy to romanticize while pondering at what EDSA meant, especially in light of Cory’s death.  The streets were filled with a sea of yellow and generations who knew nothing or little of that past imagined.  Food and flowers and the outstretched and open palm of friendship greeted soldiers with their guns and tanks.  And they won.

That must have been a glorious time.

May we be honest then that for a nation state like the Philippines, EDSA is a touchstone of what we have done and what we have failed to achieve?

Twenty-four years later, a president of the Philippines declared for the second time in our nation’s history, martial law.  We also remember the victims of Ampatuan’s massacre.  The violence at our farmlands, and in that span of time we’ve seen kidnappings of various nationals for ransom.  We’ve seen the rise and fall of powerful politicians and movie stars.

In twenty-four years, our famers are still poor and their lands now faced with drought as the scorching weather comes.  Our streets are homes for countless homeless and our jails imprisoned many juveniles.  Our lights are twinkling but not in delight. And our leader in spite of having an economic background has neither foresight nor will to ensure surplus electricity, a necessity in a constantly on digital economy.

Across the world, our Diaspora toil away to provide even the most little of food and sustenance for their relatives living in the nation.  Half the nation is without jobs, and the other half could barely afford inflation.

The dismal picture is nothing new.

In a nation with a growing and unchecked population, it is merely business as usual.  Much of our people know no better, after all.  Could you blame them when nobody teaches proper reproductive health?  We wind up with mouths that cannot be fed and minds starving for things they have no inkling could be achieved, if only potential and opportunity be given.

In twenty-four years, we find out nation’s soul being devoured by corruption across every stratum, from public to private sector.  Our nation finds its institutions, broken and back to where they were in 1986.  Well, to be honest, not quite there but almost there nonetheless.

Our nation’s laws are usurped and bent to suit the powerful.

Our national budget is horribly disfigured and the budget deficit at a record of 300 Billion pesos.

When competence and incompetence mean the same thing, we need courage, not dazzle.

We are at war and people don’t understand that it is a war for tomorrow.  Will we prance around unmindful of what tomorrow brings, patting ourselves in the back as if it means something?  Will we only see the field before them and not the horizon?

Will it be too late to rise to tomorrow’s defense?

When will you choose between a country one cares so mightily about that can one still dare to hope, to dream or will you choose to surrender to the past that cloaks itself behind the appeal to pragmatism?

This is light versus darkness.  In a country at war between hope and cynicism, where then do you stand?

Will you allow rhetoric to win tomorrow?

This has been twenty-four years of our nation’s history.  It is twenty-four years that we, as a people must crawl out of and stand on.  That is the foundation by which we build our tomorrows upon.  And we can only have faith in that future, if we have faith in ourselves.

It is upon EDSA and its legacy that we stand on today that we may choose in May.  That choice is not between men and parties, but between righting wrongs, building institutions as opposed to nine years of status quo.  Like EDSA before it, the choice is between volunteerism, and party machinery.  It is a choice between Integrity and competence.  It is about building tomorrows, and moving from the past.  It is about the incorruptible spirit of the Filipino.

This is why the Filipino is worth dying for.  She has a heart filled with courage that is steered by idealism and it runs on hope.

Amidst the depressing past and the daunting tomorrow and quite often we look at, is it just another holiday in a long line of holidays to look forward to?  While our nation buried Cory Aquino, amidst all the eulogies, it was Teddy Boy Locin’s that made the most impression.  He said, “She doubted my capacity for self-reformation, she made it effortless for me by being herself.  I did not notice that I was doing right by serving a woman who never did wrong.  I am not sure how to take this moral self-discovery.  It is so unlike myself.  But if it will bring me before her again, I am happy.”

In the context of someone who wasn't there, this is what I would like to think of as the Spirit of EDSA.  Self-discovery.  Self-reformation.  This is the permanent revolution of people power.

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image is about a unique historical event and it is used here under fair use.