Editorial: Reexamining Edsa

Seethe. Do not forget. Let Edsa be more than a “page from history.”Last February 25, Indonesian teacher Reny waited online for 30 minutes before concluding that the Filipinos studying Bahasa with her was not turning up. After Reny messaged, her students replied that Feb. 25 was a public holiday in the Philippines, a “long weekend.”Reny found it interesting that only two in a class of 15 mentioned that on this day in 1986, Ferdinand Marcos finally threw in the towel, ending his decades-long dictatorship and fleeing the country with his family and close aides for exile and eventual death in Hawaii.Observed nationwide, the Edsa People Power Revolution Anniversary is one of the more “memorable” special (non-working) holidays, appreciated all the more by a pandemic-weary populace seeking every break from nearly three years of physical distancing and pandemic-imposed restraints in travel.In terms of the consciousness of Filipinos, the Edsa People Power Revolution is contested ground, dismissed as a “dilawan (yellow)” exercise in irrelevance by those who contend that the country’s return to the oligarchy was sealed by President Cory Aquino, widow of assassinated opposition leader Ninoy Aquino who took her oath as the country’s 11th president after Marcos fled the country on the fourth day of the Edsa People Power Revolution.Both Marcos and Cory claimed they won the 1986 Snap Election, with the former claiming victory based on the official tally and the latter, on the unofficial tally by citizens’ watchdogs led by the National Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel).Other parties who oppose the Marcoses, including the current presidential bid of Ferdinand’s son, Bongbong, are dissatisfied with the dominant narrative that the country’s fight for freedom was largely waged and won by a “peaceful” revolution waged by the middle class and civil society congregating on what is arguably the country’s most famous highway, the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue that traverses 23.8 kms from Taft to North Avenue in Metro Manila.Remembering Edsa as a giant prayer rally that exorcised a dictator and returned democracy misses the decades of protracted struggles and the ultimate sacrifice of life paid by peasants, farmers, indigenous peoples, students, missionaries, the religious, community workers, journalists, artists, rebels, and other activists in Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao, all Filipinos and many foreigners who did not survive the bloody 20 years that Marcos exercised authoritarian rule as the country’s 10th president.Before February 25 becomes just another “long weekend” for a generation of Filipinos born to and raised with memories of Edsa as another smog- and traffic-congested artery in Manila made extra challenging by monster mallwide sales, there is a continuous challenge to sieve the narratives shaping our consciousness of our collective past and see connections to the present.A critical student of history may wonder why it took 20 years to mobilize Filipino sectors across the nation to oppose the Marcos dictatorship. Even more crucial to our future is to question why, despite 20 years under Ferdinand Marcos, many Filipinos are mulling the return of Bongbong Marcos to the highest public office in the land, the son of the dictator who has not apologized but even represents the Marcos legacy as the apex of Philippine progress.Life was reduced to a trifle from 1965 to 1986, the tally of Filipinos “salvaged,” “disappeared,” and “purged” by the police, military, and vigilantes unsettling in its similarities to the toll of Filipinos who “fell” in the War on Drugs waged by the Duterte administration starting in 2016.Then and now, the Edsa People Power Revolution is an instruction in storytelling: about the stories we retell, and those we forget; the stories we take comfort in, and those that shake our complacency. February 25, 2022 may just be another long weekend, culminating in historical amnesia on May 9, 2022. Or not.