EDSA: A refocus

If there is anything so misunderstood in our lives today, it is EDSA. Seventeen years ago and shortly after, EDSA was Prometheus superbly unbound. If you remember your Greek mythology, Prometheus was the god of fire and civilization. The greatest deity of them all, Zeus, had Prometheus chained to a rock on accusations the latter had double-crossed him on a deal. A vengeful Zeus robbed Prometheus of his fire. But Prometheus was just biding his time. One of the great Titans known for his wile and guile, a trickster non-pareil, Prometheus eventually stole the fire and returned it to Earth.

No one can deny that after 20 years of Ferdinand Marcos, the Philippines needed something like Prometheus. At any rate, it needed a blast of Promethean fire to bring down a hated, utterly despised dictator and empty his grimy stables of cronies, crooks and criminals. The Promethean fire turned out to be Edsa. It was a huge multitude in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps over a million. It was a mighty roar of voices and not of bullets demanding that Mr. Marcos step down.

He had no choice. He, Imelda, the family, Gen. Fabian Ver, bundled up their scandalous loot and, by grace of the United States of America, were given sanctuary in Honolulu. The EDSA crowds eventually would have laid siege on Malacañang. For sure, they would have physically dismembered each of the Marcoses limb from limb and probably burned their bodies to a charcoal crisp in the Malacañang Park.

Except that US helicopters rescued them. What does this all mean?

To this author who was in on the EDSA drama from beginning to end, it simply meant one thing. We all misread the historic meaning of EDSA. Looking back, we now realize with a tremendous misgiving that EDSA was just a beginning. Not the end-game. I know. We were all rip-roaring crazy at the time, dancing in the streets as the Marcoses fled, some of us awed by EDSA’s "miraculous hand" – white fingers clawing at the heavens to silence all thunder. Many said EDSA was a new dawn, the dawn that Jose Rizal breathed into deathless prose in his Last Farewell in the dungeons of Fort Santiago.

It was not to be. And we learned that soon enough.

Anymore than the Weimar Regime in Germany did not lead to a reflowering of the German spirit and instead ran smack into Adolf Hitler. Anymore than the quasi-socialist-liberal Alexander Kerensky government failed to carry out meaningful reform and collided against the marching, shouting, fire-breathing Bolsheviki of Lenin.

In like manner, the two EDSAs failed to deliver. Cory Aquino indeed restored democracy but around and under her a corrupt political system continued to simmer. Fidel Valdez Ramos may have brought the best of soldiery to Malacañang but the police terribly misbehaved ad bank robberies and rising crime were the order of the day. Joseph Estrada brought his jeweled boot of a barkada to Malacañang, and everybody snickered as he said: "Walang kaibigan, walang kumpadre, walang Kamag-anak."

Again, what did this all mean?

We didn’t have to wait long this time to realize EDSA II, or the whole philosophy of People Power as conceived by Filipinos, was a paper tiger. Let me explain. We Filipinos are culturally disposed to look at people and individuals as the movers and shakers of our society. We do not look at systems, grids of concepts, social, political and economic philosophies. We do not look at the underlying currents of great ideas that shape mankind, that shaped the tiger economies of Asia. We simply aped the Americans. And that was ridiculous because we were and are not Americans.

Our culture was tribal, archipelagic. The Philippines was far beyond the pale of the Industrial Revolution, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the great creative explosion of science and technology that occurred after the First World War and reached a crescendo in the 1980s and 1990s.

And so we became the laggards of Asia. Our neighbors in Asia, principally China, raced to overtake the US and the West in the pursuit of modernization. Education (principally science and math) was the key. Information Technology was the computer click to political stability and economic prosperity. Productivity, as all economists agree, was the open o sesame to every export market in the world. The Filipino is beside himself with envy and frustration as he sees the products of Sony, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Hyundai, Goldstar, Kia whirl with prodigious speed for easy acceptance everywhere in the world.

And so, what now?

Again, the end of the rainbow eludes us. But we know, we just know People Power, another EDSA won’t bring us anywhere.

Do we really solve anything with People Power? Do we exorcise the devils from our system? Would that make our botched democracy work? Would that root out the rotten intestines of our economy? Would that put the fear of God into our thieving politicians? Silence and stop crime? Divest our nation of grinding poverty? Tame the Filipino libido for producing more and more babies? Hammer steel into the Filipino spine so he can stand up to war whoops of George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld? Remove the fabled Filipino smile he brings with him to the grave even as the whole country rots and slumps to the ground?

I hardly think so. Again we blame personages.

Remove or impeach GMA and what happens? Constitutionally, Vice President Tito Guingona takes over Malacañang. But this will take some doing. The American imperium – many observers now believe – actually decides the destiny of the Philippines today as the winds of war against international terror start howling with gale force in our country. If for some reason or other, Tito cannot take over, the military will. If the likes of Angie Reyes take over Malacañang under the impetus of Uncle Sam, we might as well bow to the East and pray.

The 17th anniversary rites of EDSA looked like a discarded cigarette butt for one reason alone. As we said, People Power had lost its meaning, its relevance. It did remove two hated, corrupt revolting presidents – Marcos and Estrada – but it did not touch, alter or reform the system at all. Cory Aquino could not. Fidel Ramos could not. And, most certainly, Erap Estrada could not. It’s like a cesspool. You remove the official overlay – in our case, the president – but withal, within and underneath, it’s stink, the primeval slime of past presidencies.

The Weimar Republic discovered that in 1933. Alexander Kerensky discovered that in 1917. When both moved to carry out a batch of reforms, it was too late. Adolf Hitler and his Brownshirts had already fired up Germany for the glories of weltanschaung, the conquest of Europe, the eventual butchery of six million Jews. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, hopelessly smitten by communist preachings of Karl Marx, sought to establish the "workers paradise" in the Soviet Union even if he and his successor Joseph Visianorovich Stalin had to slaughter tens of millions in search of a false and treacherous Eden.

EDSA, yes. People Power, yes, Ninoy Aquino, yes. But they only exist today as historical trophies.

It is the greatest insult to the memory of the first and second Edsas that the government and the Church conspired to bar access to the EDSA Shrine to the very people who originated and participated in People Power. Would the government of France bar the people’s access to the Place de la Bastille where liberté, fraternité and egalité sprang from the cobbled streets of Place de la Concorde to the marbled tombs of Les Invalides? There some of the greatest of the French great lie entombed.

Why our Church, why the GMA government erected a wall at the EDSA Shrine when precisely People Power symbolized the breaking of all walls between the government and the citizenry is one of the blackest moments in our history. Why celebrate Christmas when there is no Christ Child in the manger? Why usher in spring when there are no birds to chirp, no greensward for the children to gambol?

And yet, I do not worry really very much.

There are other historic places in Metro Manila where the veterans of the two EDSAs can assemble. There is the Ugarte Field in Ayala which spawned the first big street demonstrations against the Marcos dictatorship. There is the Agrifina Circle where tens of thousands gathered to mourn and rage against the assassination of Ninoy Aquino. There is the Bonifacio Monument. Maybe the EDSA Shrine was never really meant to be the grotto of People Power. Well, the Church can have the EDSA Shrine for all we care. The power of the people can explode anywhere. Commemorate anywhere.

The people own the symbol and the le-gacy of EDSA. Not the Church.