FIRST PERSON
The more widely acknowledged holiday today would probably be the pork holiday declared by retailers objecting to the arbitrary and unwise price caps on the commodity.
Despite the truly heroic efforts of Cris Carreon and the Spirit of Edsa Foundation to rekindle the fervor, few expect much of a crowd at the People Power Monument today. He tells me many of the people he invited to be onstage today hewed and hawed.
At any rate, prevailing public health restrictions forbid too many people gathering too closely together. That will excuse the sparseness.
The disinterest in commemorating the Edsa Revolution has been a creeping phenomenon for years. I recall, when I served as commissioner for the Edsa People Power Commission years ago, attendance at the event was a problem. When we organized for the 20th anniversary celebrations, the Commission found it necessary to command the metro mayors to bus in warm bodies from their jurisdictions.
How quickly time has passed. Today we commemorate the 35th anniversary of an uprising that impressed the world – once upon a time.
In our vanity, we claimed that popular risings occurring around the world in the late eighties and nineties – including the mass demonstrations that brought down the Berlin Wall and eventually the Soviet Union – were modeled after the event at Edsa. There is little basis for that claim.
Advances in modern communications technology play a more direct causal link to mass risings. The highly reproducible audio cassette played a role in the Iranian revolution as much as the photocopier played an important role in Edsa. The Arab Spring a decade ago was called the “Facebook revolution.”
But then, it might be argued that Twitter was an indispensable element in the rise of Trumpism in the US. Today we debate the role social media pays in producing cultural silos and echo chambers where disinformation ferments.
Today, scanning the various commentaries, it seems more fashionable to describe the Edsa Revolution as a “tragedy.” That is a judgment not confined to the so-called “historical revisionists.”
There are abundant reasons why so much disappointment now accompanies the memory of a popular uprising.
Our nation’s history since 1986 has seemed like a merry-go-round of the same characters and the same follies. If it is a merry-go-round, how could the events of February 1986 be a “turning point?” If one is meandering, there are no corners to turn.
True, the ouster of a dictatorship served to usher back the old oligarchy, an irresponsible elite that misshaped our nation’s development. The rhetoric of democracy was misused either to defend old entitlements or advance populism.
The “Yellow” narrative of what Edsa meant glorified the politicians and vilified the military officers who tried to overthrow the “democratic” establishment post-uprising. That is, today, considered only one (jaundiced) point of view. It is entirely possible that the various coup attempts mounted against the Cory Aquino government actually represented the true revolutionary impulse of that historical moment.
Those behind those coup attempts were motivated by a view of the national interest clouded by entrenched clan and class interests. Had the coup attempts succeeded, they would have opened the way to a more determined leadership with a longer view of where the nation ought to go. That might have been the real turning point in our political history, speeding up our transition to a truly modern state.
But it is now entirely academic to reflect on what might have been. The moment for a truly radical break in our political history has passed. We are condemned to being led by mediocrities, constantly fragmented by factional contestation rather than unified by a consensual vision of where we want to see the next generation to be.
Our politics is now driven mainly by a certain disinterest in the drama (or trauma) of trying to build a new society. Our political discourse has been overwhelmed by the trivial. Political ideas have fallen out of fashion, replaced by personality cults in varying degrees.
Nevertheless, February 1986 remains a grand moment we must continue to reference. If there is disappointment in its aftermath it is mainly about the opportunities we missed and not about the failure to summon our people’s heroism.
What we did not realize, in the immediate aftermath of an insurrection, is that the ouster of a dictatorship is that the event opened not one but many paths to an alternative future. Instead of deliberating those paths, our politics descended into mere chatter. That is not the Edsa Revolution’s failure. It is ours.
It is always a fruitless enterprise to continuously re-litigate history. The past is past. What we should examine is our own capacity to reinvent the future.
If there is disappointment about what the nation achieved in the aftermath of February 1986, it should be a disappointment about the paucity of statesmanship in the years succeeding. We did not have a Churchill or a de Gaulle to forcefully define the nation’s rise from the ashes. The constitutional order we devised after the insurrection did not make that possible.
And so we inherit a certain debilitating orthodoxy. It is a disdain for strong leadership and powerful visions. We understand democracy as the rule of the feeble. We distrust compelling leadership. We do not want leaders who are wiser than the mob.
If there is such disinterest in commemorating the Edsa Revolution, it is because the event has been diluted rather than distilled. It is understood as part of the struggle against the past but not a celebration of the passion to recreate.