Three decades later, why Cory and Edsa have been forgotten

Weather-weather lang ’yan,” we’re fond of saying in our uniquely Filipino sense of English-Tagalog word-play humor.  Who’s in power, and who’s not;  what cause is in fashion, and what cause is not;  what actions are acceptable, and what are not… it’s all a matter of a random turn of fortune’s wheel.

I suspect that in our chuckles, we’re really acceding to a progeny of the prevailing zeitgeist of moral relativism:  political relativism.  That is, in the realm of politics—as in the case of personal morality—there really is no right and wrong, that everything is in fact a matter of personal opinion and perspective, and that moreover, these are malleable over time and without any limitations.

Moreover, I surmise all this ironically started with the contemporary political figure I love the most, President Corazon Aquino—who stood for a diametrically opposite sense of politics.

Bright yellow

On my foyer wall hangs her first painting on wood (according to my mother who gifted me the piece).  It is of a flower arrangement, painted with all the skill and innocence of a 3rd-grader.  It hangs there not because of its artistic excellence, nor the historical prominence of the artist, but because the woman in yellow holds a place in my heart.

When her coffin passed along Ayala Avenue, I in my office wear climbed the center-aisle railing, propped myself against a palm tree, and for the last time on Manila’s streets, flashed the sign for, and shouted “Laban!”  I wept so hard, a friend who happened to be nearby asked if I was OK.

When Pres. Aquino was interred, I posted on my Facebook page, “I don’t know whether Cory Aquino was a good president, and I know not whether the gates of Heaven are truly made of gold, but if they are not, today, they are surely painted a bright yellow.”  It was a time of mourning, so I was being kind.  Because sure as Heaven, she was a terrible president.

She was certainly not a bad leader in the way most Philippine presidents are bad-murderous, rapacious, or both.  Rather, she couldn’t—sometimes literally for the life of her during the multiple attempted putsches during her term in office—enforce justice, a most crucial element of any government and societal compact.

Pres. Aquino’s slogan of “reconciliation” indicated she would bank hard towards justice’s equally important counterpart, mercy.  In this, she was very Filipino indeed.  We have been an oppressed people for most of our history, and are largely Catholic and Christian after all, and so are very partial to forgiveness and mercy.

No rebelling soldiers were executed.  No Marcos cronies were imprisoned, at least not for long. No truly sizeable sequestration of assets were completed.  Not even her husband’s murderers were brought to justice.  (The underlings were imprisoned, but later pardoned by President Arroyo.  How this can be for men in uniform who assassinate a national hero beggars belief.  The masterminds were never caught at all.)  Crucially, though there are no credible stories of her immediate family enriching themselves while she was in power, the same cannot be said for her broader circle of family and friends.  (Whether this was for lack of resolve as fans like I surmise, or some more serious deficiency as her detractors claim, matters little.  Filipinos got the result they got, and have reacted accordingly.)

Democracy

Even those who have great affection for President Cory Aquino acknowledge most of this, but point out that she at least restored democracy in the Philippines.  I disagree.  Democracy involves more than installing a voting system and holding an election.  Indeed, to recall, it was President Marcos who did this first. (One need only look at any of several failed African states that started life with an election after independence, complete with English-style headdress.)  Democracy involves instilling in the national culture a deep respect for the democratic processes of the republic, and an active intolerance for any corruption of it.

Even the first presidential election after President Aquino’s term was widely believed to be tainted with cheating.  Thereafter, cheating simply became part of the election landscape, from vote-buying, “zeroing” out opponents in a district, altering late-coming counts in Mindanao, to the infamous “Hello Garci” incident.  If you have household help, do they ask you who to vote for?  Mine do.  I bet most Filipinos ask whomever they feel can most benefit them materially, or simply, feel most loyal to.

Thankfully, election-watch organizations and indelible ink are still in place, holding a very thin line for democracy, something that the wider culture I suspect would not do on its own volition.

President Aquino’s successors certainly seemed to be progressively worse on the justice and corruption fronts, with the sole exception of the second President Aquino.  From anomalous reclamation and telecommunications projects, to cronies being issued official concessions for monopoly businesses and unofficial ones for smuggling and tax-evasion, and worst of all, to passes issued to powerful people for committing individual and mass murders, the list seemed endless over the years.  So, some people understandably started asking, “Was Marcos really worse (than whomever was then president)?”  So also, most significantly for our political culture, the “Laban” people of the 1980s could not give subsequent generations a good narrative about what had been some of the most dramatic and heroic political actions in Philippine history-the fruitful denouement was abjectly missing.

We thus come to the day when an exhausted, disappointed and confused people are faced with the stealth burial of President Marcos in a place called Libingan ng mga Bayani.  There were millions who stood in the streets for the woman in yellow, from the snap election campaign to the Edsa I Revolution in 1986, and prior to that, before the coffin of her slain husband in 1983.  The evening after President Marcos’ much-delayed burial, the pro-Aquino ABS-CBN network reported that a crowd of 500 gathered at the Edsa Shrine to protest, but that at daybreak, the crowd had dispersed possibly due to the light rain that had fallen.  Weather-weather lang ’yan.