Question of the day: With our People Power’s dream betrayed, should we stop celebrating Feb. 25? Or should Edsa veterans be at the Edsa Shrine on its 31st anniversary, renewing a wayward dream with two new Filipino generations?
One answer was clear at the final performance of “Buwan at Baril sa Eb Major” at the Bantayog ng mga Bayani under February’s full moon. In an auditorium named after the revered human rights lawyer
Jovito Salonga, theater was back to its origins in a tribal hearth with a babaylan calling healing gods to our human midst.
Writing this two-act play fresh from his military arrest and interrogation in 1984 was possible only in theater artist Chris Millado’s rare pauses from the seizures and disappearances of fellow activists fighting the Marcos dictatorship.
That Bantayog evening rekindled post-Aquino-assassination fire, instigated by mosquito press reporter/theater artist Joel Saracho. With fellow seasoned actors, he quietly walked onstage in a Kabuki-like frieze of living flames—the marches, the deaths, the tears, the songs of a three-year People Power revolt. An intense tale told bare, with superb monologues and minimal lighting to stun our audience of Edsa veterans and millennials.
Filing out of the theater, we had the Marcos regime’s end at Edsa on our mind, overlaid now by 7,000 more extrajudicial killings in Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs.” Millado’s words rang in our ears: “I received the news of the restaging of ‘Buwan at Baril’ with mixed emotions, especially when a theater critic said it’s become ‘necessary theater’ again.”
Indeed, up popped a powerful Facebook meme the morning after. On the eve of Valentine’s Day, a bloodied Cupid lay dead from one of his own arrows, captioned: “Magandang balita para sa mga walang ka-date ngayong Feb. 14. Si Kupido natokhang. Nanlaban. Patay.” (Good news for those without a date on Feb 14. Antidrug police knocked on Cupid’s door. He resisted. He’s dead.)
Elsewhere on Facebook, Walden Bello (https://www.facebook.com/walden.bello?fref=ufi) acidly remarked: “Best to have the 31st anniversary also serve as interment day.” This sometime congressman resigned in disgust as an Aquino ally, then Speaker Feliciano Belmonte, temporized on addressing renewed corruption in a two-faced Congress.
Prof. Joel David proposed: “Time to bury that nice memory that turned into a succession of programs that wound up betraying the supposed beneficiaries of a democratic revolution. Let the ones who profited from it hold their little commemorative celebrations. The rest of us will have to deal with the drudgery of completing the process of change.”
Countered Bantayog ng mga Bayani executive director May Rodriguez: “I totally disagree with this view of the Edsa event being a ‘nice memory.’ That event was a sovereign people’s powerful rejection of what had been a vicious regime. People were ready to lay down their lives for a future, if uncertain, chance at freedom.
“Sure, the rich mainly benefited so thoroughgoing changes did not follow. But changes did happen or we wouldn’t be talking as freely now. We all have to own up to having let down our guard too early. We ‘moved on’ before we should have. Let’s all take responsibility for our early surrender and gird up for what we could do now.”
Credit investigator and retired bank bookkeeper Nestor Zamora took his turn: “It’s only fitting to commemorate those events, the culmination of a long painful struggle of freedom-loving and democratic Filipinos against corrupt, abusive dictatorship. To forget and be resigned does not give justice to the lives that [were] lost and the grief over the destruction of families in the quest for freedom and democracy.
“Never mind the failures of succeeding regimes. It’s the failure of the people to pursue change, allowing corruption and impunity to creep back into the body politic with a vengeance. It must be our resolve to continue and heighten the militancy of the people in the tradition of Edsa and carry on the unfinished revolution. We must learn from our mistakes and shortcomings after that uprising.”
Sounds like old coal sputtering alive under the friction of lessons learned. How many of us hope it will burst into flame again in ever unpredictable Philippine history?
Sylvia L. Mayuga is an essayist, sometime columnist, poet, documentary filmmaker and environmentalist. She has three National Book Awards to her name.