Honestly, the EDSA People Power has no significant effect on me other than it is an extra day out of the office. I was not like this before. It just grew in me through the years of seeing how we never really progressed after being “liberated” from the hands of a dictator. I realized… “binoladas at binoboladas lang tayo”.
I was an 8 year old boy who was living in Baguio when EDSA 1 happened. I vaguely remember details of the event but I remember that there were no rejoicing or excitement at home. “Cory Aquino” was the buzz word and the “Laban” sign became part of our jeers and cheers when playing. Years after, we experienced the blackouts when we transferred to Manila which we enjoyed, as teenagers, because it gave us reasons to stay up late at night. I watched coup attempts unveil before our eyes. I could say that the administration after the overthrow of the Marcoses was one shaky admin.
Decades after our supposed “liberation”, things did not improve for me and many other Filipinos. Our country struggled with the same issues of supposed corruption and power abuses by the same people who overthrew a leader with the same accusations. Only this time, mas dumami sila. I personally felt the disappointment that I became apolitical and hopeless that I have learned to accept na hanggang ganun na lang tayo. I have sat countless hours in traffic and had my own share of cramped space in the MRT. Nothing changed except for the idea that we have freedom.
I guess the idea of “we got our freedom back” was the biggest post-EDSA blinders that was given to us Filipinos. It was the failsafe that was used on us to keep us from asking and prodding more on what happened to us after EDSA. It was milked dry to keep us blind on the changes that we wanted to happen by making us focus on our “restored freedoms” which later on proved to be detrimental to the way we think. We were made to feast on these liberties to mask the reality that they were abusing the powers that they grabbed. This is the very same psychological play that made most Filipinos think that everything is our right, even if it means losing our discipline as citizens.
Furthermore, these power grabbers used economic jargons to give us an impression that everything is sound. We were told that we got this % increase in our economy or we got this upgrade in our credit standing with this institution. But the bigger question is how did these “improvements” help the majority of Filipinos. Where did it bring us? Would you say that our lives improve when Filipino commuters hold on to their dear lives as they push and get shoved just to get on a bus to and from their workplace? Can we claim that Filipino living conditions are better when we cannot even afford to give a decent home to calamity survivors despite the influx of financial assistance from other countries?
These people speak now of historical revisionism but the bigger question – is it revisionism or had the blinders fallen off for most Filipinos? A more appropriate question is that have they written a one-sided story to justify their power grab and to keep it within their fold? Is history being revised or is it now being corrected? They say that only time can really tell one’s place in history. And with the return of the Marcoses, and even Erap, to power, it begs an answer to the question if previous administrations were using history as a propaganda to keep power within them. Is history vindicating the victims from before? It is also interesting that we are getting on the why’s to the questions back then from individual who were once part of this “people power”. These responses give us a balance to what was being “fed” to us.
The party associated to this “EDSA spirit” have already admitted that a lot of the promises from the supposed uprising remain unfulfilled. Imagine that we had to endure that post-EDSA kind of leadership for decades before majority of the Filipinos, including me, finally put our foot down by electing a leader that is far from that mold. We got tired of the words and diplomacy and chose actions over words. We finally got tired of the BS that they have been feeding us and finally decided to take action on what Filipinos really deserve. Of course, we want that to continue.
It took a bloodless revolution to topple down a Marcos leadership and it took only one strong and uncouth leader to show Filipinos that EDSA One was indeed an EDSA NONE.
adobongpinoy 