“The nation-wide rebellion is escalating and threatens to explode into a bloody revolution. There is a growing cadre of young Filipinos who have finally come to realize that freedom is never granted, it is taken. Must we relive the agonies and the blood-letting of the past that brought forth our Republic, or can we sit down as brothers and sisters and discuss our differences with reason and goodwill?”

- Benigno Aquino, Jr.
August 21, 1983

It’s been a full quarter century since Ninoy said those last words, and sparked the bloodless movement that was the 1986 EDSA People Power Revolution. Today, Ninoy’s specter looms over us, waiting for the answer to that question: savage bloodshed, or peaceful discussion? Or their iterations: savage discussion, or bloodshed in the name of peace?

It’s often said that war – the way it’s going on now, or some form of it – is the crucible for lasting peace in Mindanao. I disagree: the crucible was supposed to be the peace process. No matter how protracted or how lame it was, the peace process was (at least back then) the only acceptable way of dealing with the possibility of Moro secession. You don’t have newspaper headlines back then of families who escape their homes and go to stores asking for lodging. You don’t have stories of innocent civilians getting their bodies hacked off by rampaging lunatics.

That crucible failed. Incompatibility, misunderstandings, miscommunication, and even incompetence made possible the all-out offensive that threatens to turn a rivulet of blood into a crimson tide of death. In a way, if the bloodshed is not stemmed, indeed we will have to relive the agonies and the blood-letting of a future that, all possibilities considered, may bring forth the Bangsamoro Republic. This may very well be the test of whether or not these 7,107 islands can stand together and preserve its union under one flag, one country, and can build a single sense of nationhood.

Yet to expect something so Lincoln-like of the current Administration – or from the bandit terrorists of the MILF who compromised a prospect for peace and self-determination for its brethren – is too much to expect. It’s one thing to compromise the sovereignty guaranteed and explicated in the Constitution in the name of a MoA. It’s another thing to take the lives of innocent civilians in a mad, unexplainable rampage.

This expectation – as Ninoy himself lived as an example of – falls to the youth of the Philippines. Make no mistake about it, but in the next 10 to 20 years, with the way things are going, we’ll inherit a broken nation that few grown persons will ever take the responsibility for, much less repair.

Here’s to hoping that when the time comes, our generation will not allow this farce and this blot in the history of our nation, to ever happen again.

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