AS I WRITE this, the radio blares constant updates on the rally taking place in Makati. The rally is led by no less than former President Cory Aquino herself, crowned queen of the first Edsa, along with several not-so-saintly senators and political figures by her side who want GMA out of the presidency.
I cannot, however, bring myself to feel the anger, frustration, or whatever it is they feel. I feel frustration rather because of the fact that another putsch has had to be put down, and there’s now a “peaceful” rally with stones and invectives almost patently seditious thrown from its ranks. I feel frustration that the nation has not grown or is not growing more politically mature. On the other hand, the freedoms that were supposed to have been born in the first Edsa revolution have been, I feel, misunderstood and misapplied.
Most of the middle class, business sector, and the youth are not joining this recent spate of rallies either because of two things: they don’t see anything wrong, or whatever wrong there is can be overwhelmingly overcome by just going back to work and grinding their noses into it.
Aside from the much-attacked legitimacy of the presidency, all the reasons enumerated by the fragmented opposition: rising cost of living, added taxes, poverty, have been blamed on the government and pointed out to that part of the masses that do not really understand how the system works. The middle class has chosen to respond to these “rally-able” matters by striving doubly hard. Those on the streets point to the president with condemning fingers, forgetting that the presidency of a nation has a character of governance remote from micro-management, while those who know better (presumably so, because they were elected into government positions) fuel this mistaken notion by pointing fingers in the same direction, forgetting that their very antics contribute to the circus our helter-skelter government is becoming.
The middle class: what (or, in the case of able leadership, who) is the alternative? Condemn this question if you must, but it IS the reason why no one else is joining the fray. Most students (this writer included) teeter between being thankful and irritated that classes and other activities have been suspended. Office employees and other business-class workers curse at the sudden rerouting of traffic or the blockage of traffic altogether, and teeter between exhaustion and raving madness because of goals unachieved or day missions unfulfilled.
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When the famed People Power Revolution on Edsa and throughout the country was taking place in 1986, I was a three-year-old playing hide and seek within the safety of our home in the Ilocos.
In contrast, I was attendant in “Edsa II”. Those cool January days that were enveloped by so much political heat. I was 17 and on the streets with the rest of UST’s seminarians.
Now 23 and amid all the uproar, this writer only assures a distraught elder brother that no, I am not in the fray either as a participant or observer, camera in hand (my family knows me well); that I am in the office putting this issue to bed (I’ve been in the office with co-staff for almost two weeks now); that there is nothing going on in Manila; that the unrest is only in isolated areas.
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But while I beg off from the ongoing mass actions on the streets, to be fair to those who feel they must let their sentiments be heard, the feeling of participating in something big is euphoric, next perhaps to fulfillment, even if temporary.
In 2001, over and above my mother’s pleas for me to go back to school, I was marching on the streets every time a protest rally took place. To this day I remember the very spot—one square foot—where I stood before the People Power Monument along Edsa. It was empowering. It didn’t matter if you were just one in a million (two?); what mattered was you were there, shouting with the din, contributing to its increasing volume. The feeling after that cry was heard I cannot describe up to this day.
