“SO WHAT exactly do you want from us to help you?”
Asked Management Association of the Philippines President Gregorio Navarro at the Daylight Dialogue in Malacañang Tuesday last week.
“Perhaps wearing our yellow ribbons, amongst other things, just to demonstrate exactly in a quick manner where the sentiments of our people lie.”
Responded President BS Aquino III. As though the yellow ribbon still mattered to the Filipino. Appropriated from that song of Tony Orlando – incidentally, a Manila visitor only the other week – romancing an ex-convict’s homecoming, the yellow ribbon assumed political colors hereabouts first with Ninoy Aquino’s own return to Manila that sealed his heroic destiny, deepened in hue at his daylong funeral march and the consequent protest actions, and culminated in glorious brilliance in the EDSA Revolt that ousted the Dictator in 1986.
The euphoria of EDSA though did not last all too long in the immediate descent of the country to economic limbo, punctuated by calamitous tragedies both man-made – Kamag-anak Holdings Inc. monopolizing governance, the series of coup attempts by Honasan, et al – and natural – the earthquake of 1990 and the Mount Pinatubo eruption in the following year.
The yellow ribbon was but a forgotten keepsake stored in some old baul during the successive administrations of Fidel V. Ramos, Joseph Estrada and Gloria Macapagal- Arroyo with the party it represented, Laban ng Demokratikong Pilipino receding in the umbra of Lakas-NUCD, Puwersa ng Masang Pilipino, and Lakas-CMD.
Came Cory Aquino dying in 2009, and yellow’s revival as the national color of mourning. As her husband’s death catapulted Cory to political prominence, so her own demise invested in her otherwise lacklustre boy more than enough political stock bought hook, line and sinker by a nation caught in passing, if emotive, grief.
So was BS Aquino III birthed by necropolitics. Possessed with nothing more than the appropriated yellow ribbon for his politics, and Hacienda Luisita for his economics. Comes to mind that Marxist maxim anew – of history repeating itself: the first, with Ninoy’s yellow ribbon, as tragedy; the second, with PNoy’s, a farce.
A profusion of yellow ribbons, as well as shirts, buttons, posters, confetti, came in the wake of Ninoy’s death and immediately thereafter. A dearth of anything yellow came in response to PNoy’s Tuesday call for support.
On the contrary, there was peach among activists calling for Aquino’s impeachment. And black and red among court employees to rally behind the Supreme Court justices vis-à-vis Aquino’s threat on the judiciary’s independence attendant to his (ir)rationalizations of the SCshot down Disbursement Acceleration Program.
“Our colors are red, white and blue. Not yellow.” So netizens storm-surged Facebook and Twitter, with graphics of a ribboned Philippine flag. Seeing how PNoy’s call deafeningly fell on deaf ears, indeed, countered with vehement defiance, Malacañang tried to salvage his face, in characteristic ingenious insipidity.
Thus, Presidential Communications Operations Office Secretary Herminio Coloma Jr.: “It was just a light moment in the entire dialog, I don’t think he has a specific intent on it to tell everybody to wear the yellow ribbon and start counting who wears yellow and those who wear peach.”
Seriously, Coloma? “So what exactly do you want from us to help you?” All seriousness, as exactness, is that question posed by so serious a man as the president of as serious as “the Country’s Leading Organization Committed to Management Excellence for Nation-Building.”
“Perhaps wearing our yellow ribbons, amongst other things, just to demonstrate exactly in a quick manner where the sentiments of our people lie.” As serious, as exact, is the response from the President. In as serious a dialogue among serious leaders in such serious a place as Malacañang, the center of executive power in the country.
Seriously, it is way past time this administration and its minions realized that the yellow ribbon is now collectively seen through jaundiced eyes – prejudicially hostile, that is – not anymore as the symbol of national liberation that it was in the ‘80s, but a badge of blundering ignorance and blabbering arrogance.
Yeah, most fitting to its foremost wearer, BS Aquino III.
