Caricatured

Stop blaming our children for not appreciating the Edsa Revolution. They know better than us.

I was at Edsa 30 years ago in the company of communards from Diliman. My firstborn was a toddler and my second was eagerly waiting to be born. But that mattered little the moment the tanks at the Ortigas junction revved their engines and threatened to plow through the crowd. We locked arms and prepared to stand our ground.

For 14 years until that day, I was an activist fighting the dictatorship. I was treated to the hospitality, and tender mercies, of the detention camps. I lost so many friends who did not think it foolhardy to put their lives on the line for something as abstract as Freedom.

Scientists now tell us that men in their twenties are at the peak of their powers. It is the period when genius flowers, when creativity is boundless.

For those of my generation, our twenties were spent playing cat-and-mouse games with the secret police. The best of our generation lived short lives, many dying in excruciating pain.

The springtime of our geniuses was spent surviving the repression. We read events intently. We anticipated the surprises of politics. We could peer down a crowded street and instinctively know something was amiss. We would look a stranger in the eye and, in an instant, decide to entrust our lives to him.

In the rough and tumble of resistance politics, lasting friendships were formed and love found. Living dangerously had its merits. The worst of times were also the best of times.

I recall fervent conversations in the shadows. We were young boys really who decided to change the world even before we understood it – by every instrument of violence if that was necessary.

Many of my comrades from that time could not imagine living to be 30. It was a violent time, the depths of dictatorship, especially for those who decided to fight it. The enemy, we thought, might likely kill us but they could never defeat the Cause.

From the vantage point of middle age, we recall the fighting attitudes of that time with a little embarrassment. When we share meals these days, my comrades from those gung-ho years proudly pull out their senior citizens card to claim the discount we are entitled to.

Inflection

Every moment, through those heady four days at Edsa, the band of communards I was with, knew that what we were in was merely an inflection in the stream of historical events. There was hard struggle that led to this moment and there will be hard struggles after it.

Freedom is not a constant state; it evolves. The Cause is not a destination; it is a direction.

We were debating the uprising even before it actually happened. The dictatorship exhibited every sign of “regime aging” – referring to something more than the tyrant’s state of health.

We were busy looking for the breaking points in a political arrangement that cannot possibly reproduce itself. The most important consideration, I recall, was to help ensure a “failed state” does not happen – or we could face a condition of unrestrained violence among the contending movements and factions. That would produce so much senseless loss of life.

Ninoy Aquino, exiled in Boston, knew as well the breaking point was about to happen. In conversations recounted by those who saw him there, the former senator constantly fretted over the possibility new leaders could rise and displace him at the head of a popular democratic resistance. He could not accept that and decided to assume the risk of coming home.

For a man as proud as Ninoy, irrelevance was a fate worse than death.

Sections of the military, including factions of the Palace clique, knew the breakpoint was coming. Each prepared in their own way to capture power when the moment came.

Ferdinand E. Marcos was the last person, I suspect, to realize his regime could not reproduce without him. He tried vainly to ensure his regime’s perpetuation even as his closest supporters prepared to war with each other.

The orthodox left, at that time the most important group outside the tyrannical circle was trapped in its own dogma. They decided to boycott the snap elections at a time when building tactical alliances was most important. Engrossed with capturing a monopoly of power, the orthodox left clung to orthodoxy and misread the confluence of events.

In the days following the uprising, and the formal return to power of the old oligarchy, we found the perfect word to describe the confluence of events. We called it a “conjuncture.”

Colored

The Edsa Uprising has since been colored deeper and deeper yellow.

That moment in our history has since been elevated into some sort of divine intervention into the affairs of men. It was defined as a demarcation line between the “bad old days” and the triumph of “democracy.”

There were those more comfortable in describing things in plain black and white. Everything and everyone associated with the authoritarian period was bad and everything associated with Cory Aquino was good.

In a word, the complex conjuncture of events and forces, factional and class interests, was simplified. The inflection in the course of the historical stream was reduced to caricature.

Increasingly, what we commemorate this day each year is more propaganda and less history. The caricatured “Edsa Revolution” has become the means by which one distinct oligarchic faction excludes the rest of the political field from equal access to the state.

As with all exclusionary politics, this self-serving use of Edsa will implode.