Far From Neutral Notions - Philippine politics, culture and stuff

At day’s end, I realized I just stayed home the whole time watching Grey’s Anatomy and playing Fallout 2. It wasn’t until I checked my cellphone that I realized that the 21st anniversary of the first People Power revolution — EDSA — had come and gone. And that’s a damn shame.

I was six when it happened, and whatever memories I have of the whole thing come from books, and the stories my father would tell me. He wasn’t there either, not in body anyway. But knowing him, he was there in spirit. He was, like most of the people who marched along that historic highway, outraged. It was a moment for the ages: 21 years of Marcos tyranny finally pushed a complacent people too far, with the prospect of more years under that despotic family finally proving too much to bear.

To understand how significant that is, you have to understand that we Filipinos, taken wholly, are a tolerant lot. Individually we may be as hot-headed as anybody, but not as a people. The Filipino as a collective, as a people, exist only in the dreams of patriots, academes, activists and expats looking for an identity. In reality there is only the Filipinos: individuals that, by accident of birth, are citizens of the Republic of the Philippines, with most wishing otherwise.

I see this partly as a result of over three hundred years of being under the Spanish yoke, where more often than not, it was every indio for himself. The strength of our family ties point to the circumstances of history: under the tyranny of Spain, we had to look out for ourselves first, our family second, and no one else. That we bent knee and fawned over foreigners was not an issue of lack of pride but of survival. That we would more easily welcome strangers to our homes than we would our countrymen is not simply a case of collective colonial mentality but a racial memory. It’s Stockholm Syndrome writ large. There is a certain prestige when you hang around with foreigners that is a carry-over from the times when a simple nod of approval from a Spaniard decided whether you lived or died, whether your lot in life was bettered or worsened. So we fight like dogs to get at the few scraps the masters are willing to dole out. Or, to note the popular term, crab mentality.

We are all summer soldiers, sunshine patriots, because of a distinct lack of a defining racial identity.

What we have is an individualistic nature that is selfish in the extreme, one that is so common as to be overlooked. In our history we have had people from one province or region being shipped by colonial powers to fight people from another province or region, and everybody else sent to populate the lands of the lumads and Muslims to make them minorities in their own territory. They played on our strong will to survive and separating us, ever leaving us with no sense of who we were.

Imagine what it would take to unite a people so inclined to be disunited.

It took EDSA to do that. I maintain that, while Sin and Cory and Ramos and Enrile may have played more public roles, it was the bit players evolving into something greater than the sum of its parts that made it happen. The courage of a disparate and disunited people, coming together to right a wrong, chanting Tama na! Sobra na!, enough is enough!, that made it happen. Not the plotting of two generals whose failed attempt for power came crashing down on them. Not the widow of a brave man. Not even the demagoguery of a passionate vicar. EDSA happened because, for one brief and shining moment, there was a Filipino people. And it was a glorious, righteous people. It was a people determined to set things right, who would take no more of the Marcos evil, who rose up and set those of us who were too young or too far away free.

EDSA gave us an ideal that was, finally, Filipino. Pilipino. Pinoy.

That’s what EDSA means to me, and that’s still what, to some extent, EDSA II means to me, as much as it pains me to realize that we did nothing more than replace one evil with a greater evil. But results be damned, for the moment. EDSA II was still about getting Erap out, was still about seeing a wrong, and setting it right. Unlawful as many would say later on, but still right. And I believe in it still. I believe — still — in doing what’s right over what’s lawful. How noble the law, in its majestic equality, that both the rich and poor are equally prohibited from peeing in the streets, sleeping under bridges, and stealing bread! ^{Jacques Anatole François Thibault} Order may be preferable to chaos, but not at the cost of doing what’s right.

A friend of mine, already desensitized and apathetic, once asked me at the height of last year’s drama: “Don’t you think they’d have learned by now? Why can’t they just leave it be? When are they going to stop doing this? What if the next one is just as bad, or worse? What are they going to do then?” I glibly answered: They do it again. And again, and again. Until there is someone in Malacañang who give’s a rat’s ass about the people. There is not, there should not, be a magic number of times we could do an EDSA. You do it when you have to. As many times as you need to. Because it’s the right thing to do. You don’t settle, despite what Joker Arroyo says. Because unlike Bong Austero, I am most assuredly NOT prepared to lose my freedoms and my rights just to “move this country forward”. Nor am I prepared to let you lose yours. I still believe in what’s right and good, sir, and I will not sacrifice them on your golden altar of progress, prosperity and fiscal growth. Indeed, those things should come from doing what is right and good; for it to come from elsewhere renders it hollow and meaningless.

Decency, accountability and honesty in government shouldn’t be something that’s too much to ask. It should be something that’s a given, something that’s par for the course. To quote Thomas Jefferson: The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government. Simple question, answerable by yes or no: is that the case with GMA’s administration?

If there’s one thing I truly hate about GMA, of which there are many, it’s this: she ruined our defining moment. Cory, Ramos, Enrile and their ilk may have betrayed their roles in it, but the concept — that we could unite, that we could drown our individualism for a greater ideal and do what’s right — that concept, or conceit, never left us.

Until GMA. Until her deft political maneuvering once again has us at each other’s throats. She’s the Spaniard. She’s the master whose crumbs and attention the dogs of Congress are trying so hard to get a piece of. She’s not only responsible for stealing people’s votes and farmers’ fertilizer funds and whatnot, she’s also responsible for stealing this people’s identity.

Palparan and the military may have killed hundreds of activists, but she killed what those activists are fighting for.

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