EDSA, 25

Saturday, 19 February 2011 02:56

Written by Neric Acosta

The thoroughfare that bears the famous acronym of a largely forgotten or unknown educator-hero, Epifanio de los Santos, cuts straight across the sprawling metropolis. With almost a million vehicles plying its 30-plus kilometer stretch daily, EDSA bears cacophonous witness to the historic mass mobilizations that in 1986 gave rise to a new regime and the fall of another.

Every day EDSA may be to the harassed commuters of Metro Manila the urban artery of foul air and debilitating traffic snarls. But the EDSA Shrine on the intersection of Ortigas and EDSA itself, with the colossal bronze sculpture of the Virgin Mary, reminds us all that in this predominantly Catholicized culture like ours, the symbols of religion and revolution intersect rather seamlessly.

I remember as a college senior at the state university in the heady days of 1985-86 that the ferment of student activism or the resistance to the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos was alternately grounded on the symbols of religion or the revolutionary ideology of the left. One of the defining movies of that time was “Sister Stella L,” a ‘conscienticized’ nun played by Vilma Santos who boldly embraced the cause of the downtrodden and oppressed and lived by the tenets of ‘liberation theology.’ But this was also the period of young, idealistic activists taking up the armed struggle and getting killed in vast numbers in the field of battle with military forces.

When we massed up in the streets and took to EDSA 25 years ago this month, many of those in the forefront of the barricades were nuns and priests bearing crosses and emblems of faith to face the tanks sent by Marcos. Alongside the cassock-draped clergy were the secular leaders and cohorts of militant organizations – as well as ordinary folk, privileged and impoverished, young and old, who found it in themselves to stand up to a brutal, unlamented strongman who kept a whole society in his grip for close to two decades.

Even for all its references as a ‘revolution,’ the overtones of a morality play defined EDSA 1986, resonating with the dominant cultural idioms of the suffering peon getting back at the ruthless master, or the oppressed victim finding its voice against the evil despot. The virtuous Cory Aquino, widow of the slain valiant defender of democracy, leads the quixotic charge against the ruthless tyrant and his avaricious wife. When she claims victory à la Joan of Arc in an epic battle using the sheer nonviolent strength of ‘people power,’ the world is enraptured – carried then on the newfound medium of CNN and cable TV -- by the narrative out of which legends are woven.

But the romance of revolutionary struggle – violent or peaceful – or the lofty ideals of democracy and justice borne out of religious imagery and Manichean battles of good versus evil are certainly not enough to make government functional or to run the messy, divisive quotidian affairs of state. At the very least, EDSA’s People Power Revolution, glorious as it remains in the national memory, gave us reason to believe that democracy is our birthright, just as no leader should ever be allowed to keep a people under his boot, or get away with bloody murder.

Twenty-five years after, with the roller-coaster run of chaotic, fiesta and fraud-dominated elections, several deadly coup d’etat attempts, fiery public protests and a second, country-shaking EDSA revolt, and the persistence of local politics defined still by the virulence of the guns-goons-gold mold, we realize how much more complex and daunting democratization is. The way perhaps to view EDSA a quarter of a century since we basked in its liberating glory, is to appreciate the work that is basically painstaking and in jagged progress. We are in this long-running journey of a democracy essentially in flux – constantly in a trial-and-error dynamic, with some errors (with leaders we elect, or allow to stay on, who turn out to be monstrosities who betray a people’s trust) having higher and more perilous costs to society than others.

It is easy to look back to 1986 and heave a plaintive sigh of frustration and deep regret: after all, the reasons that brought us to the streets in mass movements or brought out the best in what we thought under martial law were our already enfeebled selves, remain – or have multiplied many times over. Poverty, inequality, corruption, insurgency, and environmental damage defined the craggy political and social landscape of the last three decades; today, society is still bedeviled by these ills, which Nobel Economics laureate Amartya Sen calls “unfreedoms,” rendering the political system largely inhospitable to reform.

But the spaces for human freedom that came with a pre-Internet and pre-mobile phone age in 1986, and the attendant capacities for society’s avenues for redress and renewal, were EDSA’s foremost, resplendent legacy. We may still characterize what we have as a rambunctious, fledgling, elitist, corruption-plagued and institutionally-challenged democracy, but the sanguine, half-full perspective behooves us to take stock of the last 25 years with plentiful gratitude and copious hope. When a people reclaimed those spaces again in 2010 and turned a national election into a referendum on Philippine democracy’s own spotty, checkered record, they voted still to ratify the EDSA spirit that has remained revolutionary in its people-powered audacity, and religious in its dogged faith in country, history and the future.

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