So much fuss — both online and offline — was created by the decision of President Duterte to downgrade this year’s celebration of the EDSA Revolution.
This was to be the 31st EDSA anniversary, and the first under the Duterte administration.
No less than the President absented himself from the low-key celebration at Camp Crame.
While Duterte said that nobody can exclusively own the EDSA Revolution, not a few believe that the downgrading of its significance was due to his close relations with the Marcos family.
Like the promised change of Duterte, EDSA signified the change that Filipinos expected from two decades of Marcos’ authoritarian rule. Cronyism, corruption, militarization, massive inflation and other ills were believed to have stopped after Marcos’ unceremonious flight to Hawaii.
True, President Corazon Aquino gave back many of the freedoms that we lost under Marcos. But the other ills of the Marcos government soon found their way back into her administration, thanks to the traditional politicians who merely reinvented themselves, and changed political color like changing their clothes.
The political system was basically the same for the Presidents that followed–Fidel Ramos, Joseph Estrada, Gloria Arroyo, Noynoy Aquino, and now, even Rodrigo Duterte – as almost everyone have scampered to align themselves with Duterte’s party to obtain political favors in the name of their constituents.
The promised change at EDSA, thus far, has been blotted out by election rigging, the emergence of fake NGOs that pocketed the billions intended for the poor and ordinary Filipinos, the proliferation of illegal drugs and gambling syndicates, and what-not.
EDSA did not fail us. Rather, we have failed EDSA.
The freedom we got from EDSA was not a silver bullet that would have ended all of society’s ills and give us Nirvana. EDSA was not a one-way street. We had a responsibility to guard what we won; yet, we slowly allowed apathy and greed to return into the system.
If we learned anything from what happened 31 years ago in EDSA, it showed us that it is possible for a united citizenry to institute change.
EDSA, therefore, was and still is, a call for unity and cooperation. It is something we should strive for not just every Feb. 25, but each day.
We should continue to strive to remember our victory at EDSA lest we be doomed to suffer exactly what we fought against back then.
Poet, essayist, philosopher George Santayana has a warning to those who would rather forget and simply “move on” after what happened at EDSA: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Never again!
