Reclaim Edsa

For those who stood vigil at Edsa 30 years ago to help topple Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship, reading the snarky posts on social media that dismiss the evil against which they had risked their lives can be terribly disappointing, indeed infuriating.

The refrain harps on certain themes, including the outright lie “We could have been another Singapore had Marcos been allowed to stay.” This is a favorite line of the dictator’s son and namesake who is now running for vice president, and for whose benefit an elaborate mythmaking now flourishes.

With the May elections drawing nearer, the mythmaking has reached fever pitch, and Marcos “trolloyalists” and supporters are countering with violent language any attempt to present evidence of the excesses and abuses of martial law. It’s all of a piece with the Marcos heirs’ political comeback—the son in the Senate, his sister continuing the family control of Ilocos Norte, and their mother in the House of Representatives. With the family’s ill-gotten wealth intact, a big chunk of which is stashed abroad, it is on full-speed-ahead mode to redeem the family name that Guinness made synonymous with large-scale thievery and to erase from history and memory the members’ panicked and ignominious flight from the Palace in 1986, chased out of the country by ordinary folk who had faced down state tanks and guns at Edsa.

“Time to move on, past is past,” the remorseless Bongbong Marcos intones, distancing himself from the dictatorship as if he had no part in it. Revising history has never been easier, what with millennials—those born after Edsa, and those too young to remember—comprising 27 million of the country’s 100-million population, and more than half of its workers, according to the National Statistics Office, and wielding the gadgets that have all but taken over public discourse. By sheer number, these young voters just might decide the nation’s collective fate in May.

To be sure, there are valiant efforts to remind people of the tens of thousands of men and women abducted, tortured, killed, or simply made to disappear by the Marcos apparat. These efforts include the formation by survivors and families of victims of martial law of the Campaign Against the Return of the Marcoses to Malacañang—or Carmma, the acronym both a battle cry and a fervent prayer.

Some Filipinos who, by their silence, have become complicit in the mangling of memory can do no less. Helping bring back democratic space via Edsa is just the beginning. To complete the task, every effort must be made to pull back the young from the hypnotic sway of a martial law makeover.

How to tell the story of Edsa 1 and the long and dangerous roads that led to it? Have parents sufficiently taught their children the lessons of martial law, including the necessity of critical thinking, speaking up when something is wrong, and protesting thievery in high places?

Have there been enough attempts to use popular media to dramatize the countless documented stories of how Filipino lives were lost, upended or ruined by Marcos edicts that, for example, imposed an unjust levy on coconut farmers, confiscated privately owned industries to establish state monopoly, and fractured families with illegal arrest, search and seizure orders?

Creative ways of making the young apprehend the brutality of martial law can be included as supplemental exercises to history and civic classes. (One comic strip suggested that for a first-hand, if flippant, taste of the “New Society,” parents withhold their children’s daily allowance, confiscate their gadgets, and forbid them from watching their favorite shows. Oh, and if they talk back, tape their mouths! That’s “peace and order,” martial law style.)

With Edsa’s 30th anniversary activities in full swing, today is an opportune time to visit the People Power Experiential Museum at Camp Crame. Entire families can have an interactive look back at the era through theater, cinema, photography, performances, installations and allied arts. Organizers should make concrete plans for a permanent site for the museum, where students can visit regularly as part of their lessons, instead of going on field trips to the malls. The experience can be used for history classes, with Edsa veterans serving as resource persons to talk about the unvarnished truth in this chapter of our history.

Reclaiming the past cannot be more crucial than it is now, with Edsa at risk of being merely associated with traffic, and the collective memory of being inexorably hijacked by the years.

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