First, the good news. The martyrdom—heroism, if you will, of the late Ninoy Aquino, his 41th death anniversary , will not be taken off the table in the list of official holidays next year. In other words, it remains sacrosanct. The foreseeable future, at least in the last five years of the Marcos Administration, remains to be seen or to the tea- leafers.
For now, you can still tie a yellow ribbon round the old,oak tree, if you wish, as you sing the popular signature song of Tony Orlando, privately because both are now political taboo or politically incorrect. Besides, the opposition has now gone Jurassic, why take the risk?
Now, the bad news. Next year, another sacrosanct historic celebration is taken off the list of official national holidays. The 1986 People Power at EDSA that made the Filipinos the toast of the democratic world will be taken off. From toast to roast? Heaven forbid.
There’s no explanation or it’s hard to come with a plausible legitimacy.. The two events are historically inextricably linked. Ninoy’s death caused the mass restiveness that boiled over into a peaceful revolution that was EDSA. Doing away with one diminishes the other, either way.
The present dispensation may be faced with a kind of historical cul de sac. It’s understandable. The heroic event that threw away the yoke of the Marcos dictatorship and sent away its perpertrators and their ilks to exile 10,000 miles, can only bring back the nightmare each time to those who are back at the political saddle. A bad dream is always a painful terrible thing.
The famous “aha” moment – epiphany—at the long and winding highway in a peaceful protest of an unprecedented political convergence is now on the verge of being extinguished from the Filipino memory. Don Panyong, the Filipino genius after whom the route was honored, must be turning from his grave.
So does our national hero, Jose Rizal. In his essay, “The Philippines A Century Hence+”, he predicted that Filipinos would be roused from their stupor and overthrow their oppressors. He might as well have foreseen the peaceful revolution at EDSA. “ A nation acquires respect,” he wrote,” not by abetting or concealing abuses, but by rebuking and punishing them”.
Some powerful people disagree with Rizal, presumably those who may feel that a harsh rebuke like a People Power Anniversary is better left uncelebrated as a national historic feat consistent with what Rizal hoped for the future for Filipinos. Is February 25 not worthy of celebration as June 12? Doesn’t forgiveness deserve a genuine apology, even true repentance, ? Or is the narrative about questionable servers in 2016 presidential election worth looking into? Or is it the right of the victors, given a second chance, to write or re write history?
There are now talks of removing the “word” dictator in books when students are taught Philippine history during the Marcos regime. Obviously, a latter-day hero buried belatedly in a sacred ground for patriots doesn’t deserve the notorious epitaph. Anything, apart from the word itself , that It comes close to it, like the celebration of events that affirm the truths of history, is anathema.
The anniversary commemoration of the EDSA People Power in 1986 cannot go on in this sense. That is the only logic possible in the exclusion of the event from the official list of holidays in 2024. Perhaps, the respect the nation has supposedly earned by President BongBong Marcos is his diplomatic trips abroad has rendered the anniversary entirely irrelevant or wholly embarrassing.
Whatever respect those trips earned, it is not consistent with the national hero’s idea or ideal of a how a nation should acquire that respect.
“They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, Ernest Hemingway wrote in “ The Movable Feast”, “but it always seemed to me that those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with a better soil and with a higher grade of manure.”
Are the jokes on us, along with a higher grade of manure? Or are some people, as it has been quoted from a former first lady, simply smarter— better — than others?
It is possible, not remotely, that the death anniversary of Ninoy will go out of fashion, for political reason. That is consistent with the idea of doing away with the EDSA People Power anniversary. The mission would have been completed that way. History’s movement from tragedy to farce, as described by Marx, would have been fulfilled.
The jokes remain with us. There is the continuing refusal to allow the International Criminal Court to investigate the charge of crime against humanity committed in the so-called war on drugs by the previous administration despite overwhelming evidence and the latest admission of the principal .
There are others that only show the legacies of the People Power event have been disrespected or ignored. The enemy has come, said Pogo – not the Chinese gamblers—and the enemy is us.
We have been hiding our pains and foolhardiness behind a poor, practical philosophy. Healing is matter of time — in our case, a generation— but is also an opportunity. But alas, In our case and in our time, the opportunity is used against us to deny that there was grievous wound inflicted and as Santayana cautioned , need not be forgotten so it won’t happen again.
Meanwhile, some smart people laugh all the way to the corridors of power and the bank.
