CORY never wanted to become President.

She never wanted to be the presidential candidate. When the idea was first broached to her after Ferdinand Marcos challenged his enemies to a snap election, she balked at it. She pointed to everybody else as the best man for the job. And Doy Laurel was more than ready?indeed eager?to do it. But at the end of the day, or after a long convention to decide it, the vote was unanimous. The best man for the job was a woman.

She had no choice but to accept it. After she did, however, she plunged into it heart and soul.

Still, Cory never campaigned to become president.

From the start she knew she was not a ?presidentiable,? she knew she was a symbol. Marcos tried to capitalize on it by saying she was ?walang alam.? She responded by saying that true enough she had no experience oppressing the nation. She had no experience lying, cheating and stealing. And she had no experience killing. It was not a question of competence, though heaven knows just doing the opposite of lying, cheating and stealing, not to speak of murdering, which was to tell the truth, to do the right thing and to respect other people?s property, not to speak of life, was competence of epic proportions. But more than that, it was a question of trust. Would you trust someone who promised heaven and gave hell, or someone who promised only by her existence, by her life, by very story that you were not alone, hindi ka nag-iisa, she too knew what it meant to be oppressed?

The first time I saw how the world looked at Cory, or looked up to Cory, then was when she announced her candidacy at the Luneta. She was not an orator by any means, but eloquence is a tricky thing. It often goes by strange and magical rules. I was driving slowly through Quezon Avenue, and I swear the place looked like the sort of thing you saw in the province at Angelus, when the church bells chimed six o?clock p.m. and everyone froze in their tracks, in silent prayer or reflection. Everyone was still or drifted in the shadows while Cory?s voice echoed?literally from the collective booming of every TV and radio turned on to her speech?in the brittle air. It was Angelus hour, too, if I recall, the hour when light and darkness fought each other, or came together like lovers.

And from the start, Cory knew she was not fighting an election, she was fighting a fight whose stakes were higher, whose cause was grander, whose consequences were starker. The world did not need to be reminded of the last. The elections were ushered in by Marcos?s thugs chasing down Evelio Javier from the capitol of Antique and gunning him down as he hid in the toilet of a shop. It was broad daylight in plain view of the public. The public responded by burying him the same way they did Ninoy Aquino, and the same way they would Cory, tumbling out of their houses like a flood to send a flood of tears to the departed and a flood of curses at the man/woman they wanted to depart.

There was no small amount of reminders as well for the fact that the snap election was no ordinary election, if it was an election at all. The Left had boycotted it, in the same way that they had boycotted the 1978 elections in the certainty that Marcos would cheat massively and respect no result other than that he won. It had been so before, they said, it would be so again. Then (as now) there was the Comelec to guarantee the wrong person won. Then (as now) there were the generals to guarantee it was enforced.

No matter. Cory, Jaime Cardinal Sin, Pepe Diokno, the human rights lawyers, the campaigners, the NAM, the Yellow Brigade, the nuns and priests, the activists, the urban poor, the workers, the farmers, the housewives, the ordinary folk?the people who would soon turn into the battering ram called Edsa?were not there to win an election, they were there to win a world for their children. They were there to end a regime that had ground the country to heel, that had stolen not just the people?s wealth but the people?s lives, the people?s hope, the people?s future. They were there to light a candle rather than curse the darkness.

And the people responded to it as a drowning man to a log, as a man lost in a desert to an oasis. Overnight Metro Manila turned into a sea of yellow, people pinning yellow ribbons on trees and posts while the activists came out in the dead of night in lightning raids to post their peryodikits on walls. Overnight, the world rang with song, Marcos regaling the world with Vangelis?s ?Chariots of Fire? (poor Vangelis, I can no longer recall his famous composition without associating it with Marcos) while Cory let loose the sobbing anguish of ?bayan ko, binihag ka, nasadlak sa dusa? and the soaring dream of making the impossible dream possible. Even ?Tie a Yellow Ribbon,? a song that can make any musician cringe, somehow sounded inspiring.

It was the snap elections of course that preceded Edsa. I?d go further and say that it not only preceded Edsa, it sparked Edsa. The RAM mutiny merely lit the fuse, the snap elections created the fuse that led to the powder keg in the heart of a ravaged land. I?d go even further and say it not only sparked Edsa, it was the original Edsa, young and old, rich and poor, strong and weak turning out of themselves transcending themselves, dreaming the impossible dream. The one that took place three weeks later was merely its culmination. Officially, Cory did not win the snap elections, though there is the walkout of the disgusted Namfrel volunteers during the count to say otherwise. No matter. She lost the battle, and won the war.

There?s a lesson there worth learning. Cory never wanted to become president and never fought to become president.

That was how she became so.