It is time for us to outgrow People Power. “Outgrow,” take note, is completely different from “forget.”
The 1986 Edsa Revolution has become a dangerously idealized snapshot. I was only six in 1986, just old enough to have fuzzy memories of singing “Bayan Ko” with classmates without fully appreciating the words, much less their context. Even a toddler could feel the unmistakable sense that something truly great had happened, that the Filipino was basking in the world’s admiration outside boxing or “American Idol.”
But we are all too tempted to stop there, permanently fixated on that grand feeling of seeing nuns and ordinary people holding rosaries stop tanks, of stunning the world and ourselves with a peaceful return to democracy. The danger is apparent when one tries to see the Edsa Revolution from present students’ perspectives, from the perspective of those who cannot truly feel those great emotions because they were not even born yet. They
necessarily ask the fiftysomethings haranguing them about forgetting something they cannot possibly remember, What did this great event called Edsa achieve?
Nothing, today’s students end up telling themselves, because they see not the majestic human wall on Edsa but the failure and frustration that followed. Almost three decades later, they see the same power shortages, the same stunted infrastructure, the same brazen “hulidap” in broad daylight on Edsa itself, the same laggard status relative to many economies, and certainly the same rapacious graft and corruption. As an incumbent Ateneo de Manila student leader put it to me, “Aquino” to his peers means, not Ninoy Aquino or Cory Aquino, but Kris Aquino.
It is this picture of Edsa as a failed promise that the original students, now in their late forties or older, fail to see. It is this picture that pushes today’s students to embrace persistent revisionism on Facebook and wonder if martial law was better for us undisciplined Filipinos, after all. Everything that happened afterwards necessarily falls short of the over-idealized, increasingly abstract vision of Edsa that we have put on a pedestal.
We have become obsessed with recapturing that perfect moment at Edsa that our unconscious approach is to attack every problem in one fell swoop with another grand spectacle. After all, anything worth doing is worth doing to great exaggeration for Filipinos. A year after the Million People March at Luneta, too many of us would embrace a people’s initiative to enact an antipork barrel law, a piece of paper that would supposedly end corruption once and for all, never mind that the piece of paper is pointless anyway because it would prohibit structures that the Supreme Court already prohibited in its antipork rulings. We have idealistic neophyte senators championing more specific measures such as finally pushing the freedom of information bill or identifying the segments of the budget process where more transparency is required. To too many, though, these sensible measures lack the thrill of another People Power and would rob a grandstanding activist of the chance to challenge the President to sign a vague people’s initiative.
We of the Class of 2001, now in our thirties, still remember the comparable euphoria of
Edsa II and inviting then Chief Justice Hilario Davide Jr. to speak at all our graduations afterwards. We also remember the comparable frustration of feeling that the corruption never stopped and wondering whether we were right to force an elected president to resign. We certainly became conscious of letting institutions function. Many of my peers were less concerned with the verdict in Chief Justice Renato Corona’s impeachment, instead asserting that it would be a milestone in Philippine democracy if an impeachment trial would peacefully run its course with no more walkouts and no more rallies. Indeed, we students at Edsa II particularly remember that the foreign media did not praise the Filipino people the second time around, but criticized us as politically immature and open to mob rule, albeit having the friendliest mobs in the world as far as mobs go.
Our consciousness of institutions and rights remains stunted under the romanticization of Edsa. When Joey Ayala reinterpreted the national anthem at TedX Diliman 2013 (now with over a million YouTube views), a Supreme Court justice and the audience joked that he would be jailed under the Flag and Heraldic Code, which makes it a crime to sing the anthem not “in accordance with the musical arrangement and composition of Julian Felipe.” That gathering of thinkers certainly disagreed with jailing Joey, but not one invoked how the constitutional right to free speech we regained at Edsa must be superior to the well-meant flag law. Edsa will be more meaningful when we can think in terms of rights, beyond mere agreement or disagreement.
We must outgrow Edsa as a single historical event and move to remembering it as the first step in a long process of rebuilding. We must outgrow spectacular exercises of People Power and embrace silent, everyday acts of citizenship. We must be inclusive and emphasize that today’s idealistic students not yet born in 1986 are the heirs to this overlong, often exasperating process. “Never again” must mean that each generation of Filipinos is perpetually ready to return to Edsa if an incomparable horror such as martial law returns, but ready because it hopes to spare the next generation from having to return to Edsa yet again.
Oscar Franklin Tan (@oscarfbtan, facebook.com/OscarFranklinTan) cochairs the Philippine Bar Association Committee on Constitutional Law and teaches at the University of the East.