Just days afterward, Mr. Estrada hied to the same neighborhood – the same Great Unwashed – in Tondo to campaign for his Puwersa ng Masa senatorial candidates. Look and weep again. He drew lusty cheers from the shanty-dwellers. And many women in the crowd even wept at his sight. And it didn’t matter really if the former president would soon be arraigned in court on charges of plunder, misuse of government funds, perjury, bribery, and possession of unexplained wealth in the billions of pesos. To them, these were falsehoods cooked up by the rich and powerful of Makati.
In other countries, a former president in this plight would have been booed and ridiculed, spat upon, the target of bilge and rotten tomatoes, scorned and disparaged, insulted with four-letter words.
So, where are we at? Isn’t it an abject failure of our democracy that Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo – who has committed no recorded crime or felony and in fact was borne to Malacañang by People Power II only last January 20 – should be so insulted and jeered? What does that make of us as a people? As a society? As the first nation that trumpeted the triumph of republican democracy in Asia (the Malolos Republic) in 1898? That we breed an ignorant poor hostage to celebrity and nothing else? This is spit in our collective eye. We must study and analyze what has gone wrong. Or right.
Let us compare the two EDSAs.
And yet the dictatorship maintained the fiction that it was for the poor. It was a mastery of psywar. This was the pioneer current of the illusion that 12 years later one Joseph Ejercito Estrada refined to diamond sharpness with his campaign slogan, Erap para sa mahirap. Ferdinand Marcos was aloof, often imperious, a genius in the use of power. Imelda, on the other hand, did the populist role – in great style. She swept with gay and sprightly abandon into the squatter areas of Tondo. She could act. She looked like a queen and was welcomed like a queen. She studied and learned Tagalog with a flourish. And conversed with a flourish. And now, the Rose of Leyte swished and sashayed into barong-barongs – distributing gifts and largesse.
Do you wonder then that even now Imelda can poke her head into any Tondo shanty and brighten up the faces of its inhabitants?
And so we go back to Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew who said our democracy was dubious and perhaps even spurious because it failed to educate and enlighten our poor. We have easily 35 percent or more of our population who are classified as impoverished. A family of five cannot survive on the minimum daily wage of about P250 per day, can eat only two measly meals, perhaps only one with hardly any meat. They cannot adequately clothe and shelter themselves. They are famished for regular jobs or employment. They live as animals live, behave as animals behave, snaking through the squalor of their daily lives, many of their kind feasting on garbage heaps like Smokey Mountain and Payatas.
Whose fault? Our fault. Whose responsibility? Our responsibility. These are the wretched of our earth, but God’s children no less. And yet many of us in the middle and upper classes hardly give a damn. In Makati and other igloos and citadels of the rich, the lords and ladies of business care mostly about profits and nothing much else. They hated Joseph Estrada and wanted him overthrown by the streets not because he was immoral and debased but because he did not give business "a level playing field". So their businesses suffered. Atong Ang was the biggest insult.
So there is something wrong. Political scientists say almost to a man we have a "soft state." This means the institutions of our democracy are fragile, our politicians are almost hopelessly corrupt as is our judiciary. We are of the belief that scoundrels in our military and police have linked up with drug and gambling lords, big-time smugglers and racketeers. Money by the big bags. We are aghast not a single drug lord has been arrested and booted into jail. Was it drug money – more than anything else – that enabled the Estrada presidency to amass so much loot in such a short time?
God, those mansions! God, that name Jose Velarde! God, those immense bank accounts! God, Loi and those mistresses with bank deposits that would have been the envy of the girdled and jeweled Mesdames of the Capitoline. And they say Dr. Loi has a chance to win a Senate seat? God forbid!
As so we go to EDSA II. We might find some answers there, some clues, some strands, a spoor that could ride a locomotive. Yes, there are substantial differences with EDSA I. The militant left (communist, socialist, nationalist) linked hands with EDSA II. They ignored and boycotted EDSA I. They were convinced the street mutiny of February 1986 was simply a bourgeois undertaking, supported by the Church. They were convinced the CPP-NPA revolution then was close to victory. In five to seven years they could wage the "strategic offensive" that would impale on the nation the "dictatorship of the proletariat." All power to the workers and peasants!
They were wrong. They miscalculated. They misread the assassination of Ninoy Aquino. Communist revolutions over the world sputtered. The heartland of communism in the Soviet Union collapsed like a busted balloon. A capitalism that reinvented itself, that excelled in superior technology, that expanded production with phenomenal speed, that poured goods and jobs all over the world, wrenched even communist China into free-market capitalism, led to the end of the Cold War in 1991.
Ergo, the militant left in the Philippines had to reinvent itself. Their big advantage was they were genuinely pro-poor, however ideologically twisted, untimely and bloody their means to achieve egalitarianism.
But we come to the essential difference of EDSA II. The youth.
This is what the present Comelec under chair Alfredo Benipayo cannot or refuses to understand. When you have history stirring and struggling in your hands like nests of great birds ready to soar, who cares about a 120-day deadline? This youth, if enabled to register by the Comelec, can and will change the course of our history. They are our educated youth. They are college students, young professionals, visionaries, idealistic, brave with raised fists – at the cusp of a great electoral experience. They will – together with the middle and upper classes – vote with their minds and their consciences. And their values. They number about four million. To disenfranchise them would be to urinate at the now sacred shrine of EDSA.
And hopefully, they will outnumber or neutralize the Great Unwashed, our wretched or superstitious poor who – through our fault – seek to elect only movie stars and celebrities. And all that cheap junk. The youth will vote for Winnie Monsod, Bobby Tañada, Obet Pagdanganan, Liwayway Vinzons-Chato who richly deserve to be in the Senate. They’ll boot out the senatorial candidates of the Craven Eleven.
It was John Stuart Mill who said that "responsible political participation requires education." G. Sartori said, "The object of election is not to promote popular participation but to select leaders." This is no brief to make our electoral process selective. This is a brief to expand the horizons and benefits of education to our poor, so never again shall the ghoulish like of Joseph Estrada befoul the citizenry.
This is GMA’s greatest challenge.