NOTE: This is a slightly different version of the photo-essay that this blogger wrote for 28Feb-06Mar issue of Fil-Am Star, a weekly newspaper published in San Francisco, CA for "Filipinos in Mainstream America."
February 25 this year, the 28th anniversary of the People
Power or EDSA Revolution of 1986, was a special holiday in the Philippines but
it was for schools only. Being a
Tuesday, it was a regular working day in government and in the private sector.
Commuters to their workplace in the morning could have
noticed that the People Power Monument was adorned with yellow flags and the
yellow flowers, and a wreath-laying ceremony was going on led by Vice-President
Jejomar Binay.
They could have missed the festive crowd of past
celebrations. For the first time, the
anniversary observance was brought outside Metro Manila to Cebu City, where the
peaceful encounter or “salubungan” of the military and the civilian contingents
was re-enacted with popular movie actor Dingdong Dantes as then Gen. Fidel V.
Ramos, and Sen. Benigno ‘Bam’ Aquino IV as his uncle then Senator Butz Aquino
of the August Twenty One Movement (ATOM).
According to reports, President Benigno Aquino III chose
Cebu as commemoration venue because this was where his mother Cory called for
civil disobedience and where she stayed with the Carmelite sisters during
outbreak of the EDSA revolt.
Outside of government-sponsored anniversary events, there
was the call of the Million People March to Scrap Pork Barrel movement for a “Black
Tuesday at EDSA.” It urged their
followers on social media to assemble at the EDSA Shrine in black and express
indignation against RA 10175 or the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012.
While there were not many who came to advocate “Stop
Cyber Martial Law”, “No to E-Martial Law” or “Junk RA 10175,” this is a
hot issue in social media discussions. To
netizens, the specter of the oppression of the freedom of speech and
information looms from the Supreme Court ruling on online libel even if it
declared three provisions of the
cybercrime law unconstitutional -- unsolicited commercial communications,
real-time collection of traffic data, and restricting access to computer
data.
This reminds us of the noose around our necks when the
Marcos dictatorship controlled mass media, the wealth of the nation, and the
coffers of government. We learned more
about our government and the lifestyle of those in power from reportages in
foreign publications, reproduced and circulated through network of friends of
friends by multiple “Xerox” journalists, an underground real social media of
those times.
Breaking loose was what we did twenty eight Februaries
ago. We knew it was a military rebellion
that Cardinal Sin called for the people to support. But It transformed into a truly
civilian uprising when the multitude of Filipinos secured Camp Aguinaldo and
later Camp Crame in support of the secession of Defense Secretary Juan
Ponce-Enrile, AFP Deputy Chief of Staff Fidel V. Ramos and the Reform the Armed
Forces Movement (RAM) from the Marcos government.
In the midst of that peaceful revolution on EDSA,
somebody picked my pocket. By today’s spending standards, the money contents
were not much. A Protestant minister who found it empty in a gutter
mailed it back to us some time during those euphoric days after Ferdinand
Marcos, his family, and his trusted cronies were flown out from Malacañang
Palace to Honolulu, Hawaii.
We were too busy with the camera, and with so many
revolutionaries milling around during that bright, sunny 25th day of February
and getting into multiple body contact every so often, we could not have
noticed somebody's sticky fingers fishing for our wallet in our back pocket.
It was not a heavy price though for the victory that came
afterward. We soon forgot about it when word got around that the dictator had
fled, and we went honking down the avenue on board a good friend’s Volks Beetle
exchanging cheers with other sweat-drenched, exhausted yet ecstatic souls along
the way.
The dictatorship was ousted and democracy restored, but
for the past twenty years it has been a rough roller coaster ride through coup
d’etat attempts, infuriating brown-outs, a second EDSA revolution, uneasy peace
in the south, natural disasters, impeachment cases, allegations of plunder and
pork barrel scams, widening gap between the rich and poor, from the first
presidency of mother Cory to the incumbency of her son Noynoy.
It looks like the spirit of the 1986 EDSA has dimmed in
the minds of the veterans of that revolt, more so among those who are still in
government service. We can understand if
the generations younger than 28 have not found meaning in the people power
history. The lessons learned from that
political experience have not been imparted to them.
We remember that at the EDSA@26 commemoration at the
People Power monument, people wrote down on big white boards their personal
stakes for the country: “Anong Taya mo
Para sa Pilipinas Natin?”
People wrote: jobs, peace in Mindanao, iteration of
Aquino’s “daang matuwid”, etcetera, virtually a wish list from the peaceful
revolution of 1986. Has the Revolution
failed? Or, did we fail the Revolution?
