The Permanent Revolution of People Power

A few days ago, we were remembering yellow, remembering Cory. As the nation buried Corazon Aquino, the generation that I belong to got a taste of Power Power. We grew up never knowing the atrocities of Marcoss, and were either fledgeling to remember or too young to have lived through People Power. As we buried Cory, I heard songs of that generation. They were beautiful compositions that perfectly capture not just patriotism but that era in our nation’s history. I thought, as Lea Salonga beautifully sang “Bayan Ko” (My Country), Filipino does lend itself perfectly to poetry, more than English ever could.

Why then, for far too long has People Power for us, was this useless exercise of street protest?

Ricky Carandang makes sense, doesn’t he? He wrote in his eulogy for our fallen President Cory:

It has become fashionable these days to blame you for all of that. Because you didn’t do enough to prevent your revolution from being dismantled from within.

the people who say that fail to see what 1986 was really about. It wasn’t about you saving us from the Regime and everyone living happily ever after. You did your part everytime you were called upon to do so. The problem was we expected you to do it all by yourself while we stood on the sidelines. We didn’t realize that we had a role to play too and that one person would not be able to do it alone. You didn’t fail. We did.
That was the lesson of people power that you tried to teach us. It was a lesson we have still not learned. And now you’re gone. Today we weep not just for you, but for ourselves.

How then do we reconcile a public that privately grumbles and remain behind closed doors at their disgust while they watch the news or read the daily paper?

A few years ago, @mlq3 wrote about an immoderate threat when representatives fail the people. In largely the same vein, Sparks wrote about Civilizing Philippine Politics. They write from the heart. Their passion as do many across the different strata of our society is clear as is their sentiment. After all, every well-meaning Filipino is equally outraged, equally passionate, equally disgusted at the madness, the decadence, the decay of our society.

Arroyo’s recent US$ 20,000 dinner is just one of many, if not least in a long line of atrocities to the Filipino people that not only she, but Filipino politicians in general have done. They have been destructive to our aims.

How then do we fix it? Is a call for Transparency at this juncture a first step?

@rom on twitter (not the plurker) had asked me: “@cocoy and yet none of these politicos are transparent enough. WHY? That is the question.” And @rom added that there should be a campaign for transparency. This sentiment echoes across strata of our society. Again, spot on is Sparks’ The Return of Delicadeza:

I am afraid the past few months, if not years, has resurrected the call for delicadeza. I hear it now in response to the National Artist controversy and most recently the 1 million Peso dinner of President Arroyo and other government officials in New York. I am hesitant to attribute the death of President Aquino to the belated calls of propriety, of what is just and fair, especially of high-profile leaders of the country. But remembering Cory and her sense of delicadeza, I suppose it is not out of place to compare.

More importantly, I think the call for delicadeza is a sign that as a collective, we have allowed our leaders and each other to push beyond limits of basic decency. That is, beyond bounds of what is proper, what is just and what is fair.

If we talk of morality, let us talk of these values. I personally, shy away from talk of god. The deity is such. And we, we are human.

Romany of the House of Smoke aptly douses cold reality:

Well, what did I really expect? That politicians would keep their grubby, self-serving, paws off of the public upwelling of love for Cory Aquino? HAH! Pipe-dream!

She goes on to say:

Ironically, it’s the blatant lust for power – evidenced by the readiness to prostitute genuine public sentiment for their own selfish ends – of these people who are making a campaign platform out of GMA’s evils that is precisely making me think that, were they to assume the Presidency, they would be just as likely to blow twenny thousand dollars for dinner.

Maybe that’s why we’re not hearing too many cries of indignation yet. Maybe they’re still figuring out how not to sound too hypocritical about it. LOL. Y’see, all these politicians know that the Filipino people normally accept that there are certain privileges available to some in society. We have no huge problem with inequality per se; the rich do what the rich do, while the rest of us, well we do what we do. The problem arises when we have our faces rubbed in the equality of it all. And then comes the outrage; the righteous anger; and the choruses of “with so many people starving, how can they spend so much on food!” and “OMG! have they no shame?!” and countless variations and combinations of those two fundamental sentiments. Very Animal Farm-ish.

Since Gloria has gone and rubbed our faces in it, it should be open season on her. But see, the pols know that they’ll have to do Le Cirque now. I mean, since Gloria did it, it’d be a matter of pride and social status for the next president to have Bollingers at that fancy restaurant. So they have to tread carefully on this, always with an eye out for the possibility of them being in the next Philippine contingent to sit in that restaurant – either as President or as President’s sycophant.

Cory’s passing made us remember our better selves. Romany said what everyone has always known. Institutionalizing transparency is a first step in encoding unto our nation’s DNA, what Sparks call “values”. Our nation needs to institutionalize delicadeza: the values Cory Aquino herself lived as a public official.

Delicadeza is a dimension of People Power. It is the standard by which Corazon Aquino aimed for. Though others around her failed, it doesn’t mean, she failed.

With elections looming over the horizon, the two biggest clear and present danger to the Philippines’ democracy is 1) a continuation of Arroyo’s regime, in however form it takes and 2) we elect the same fools to every level of society. Take this guy who The Marocharim Experiment had called out for the great dishonor of even thinking of renaming EDSA in favor of Cory.

We must expect our leaders to be of higher quality. One iota of Corazon Aquino’s sincerity can take them a long way. We need serious and sincere leadership going forward. If “The State of the Filipino Nation”, “Number-crunching, Lying and Arroyo’s SONA”, “The Recession We Ignore”, (and even before Arroyo’s SONA) “Nielsen’s Report on Filipino Consumer Confidence, Concerns and Spending”, has not given you pause that tomorrow’s challenges are real and daunting, what then? Would you read those posts not as critic, but as a call for action?

This is true too:

President Aquino asked for our Filipino community to help the Philippines not just by sending money remittances and balikbayan boxes to the Philippines but in a more politically sophisticated way:

“You can help by becoming a strong political force in your adopted country and using that force to influence your adopted country’s attitudes towards your mother country. Follow the lead of the Jewish-Americans who, despite being a small minority, form an indispensable pillar of a strong and independent Israel. Surely they are no stronger, no smarter, no more imaginative or dedicated than you are. They may be more organized, more politically oriented, more helpful to each other. And certainly they work hard at keeping America’s interest in Israel alive at all levels of society—in business, in education, in government, in the arts and sciences.

And so must you with respect to the Philippines. You must guard the image of the Filipino that the February Revolution burnished so brightly. You must guide those joining your ranks so that you enhance the image of Filipinos here. All impressions of you, American though you might be, will hark back to the Philippines.

Strive for political power in this country. Unite. Learn from the new Philippines how people, acting together, have made the difference at home. You too can make a difference here, for your own betterment and that of generations to come.”

Cory also asked us to educate ourselves and our youth about our history and our provenance, our heroes and our pride: “Be proud of your roots. Do not let your children or your grandchildren forget that they came from a land that produced Rizal, Bonifacio, Mabini, and yes, Ninoy—men who could stand shoulder to shoulder with the best that this country or the world has produced.”

Isn’t it?

Every moment we pander, is a moment of missed opportunity for the Filipino. The mistake of post People Power, as Ricky Carandang pointed out, was that we expected our problems to be solved by Cory Aquino. We expect the same of our leaders now.

Corazon Aquino is dead and we will not see her like again, not for awhile. Delicadeza, the values, the ideal, the standard that is People Power, she did not take to her grave. We saw it there, living with us as we the people gave her a hero’s send off.

We can not leave our destiny in the hands of our leaders. We expected it of Cory as we expected her successors to lift the people out of poverty. We expected them to answer everything for us; to open doors for us. There is a dimension of People Power we’ve not tapped. It involves entrepreneurship, the kind that is honest. The kind that build jobs and the kind that send kids to school. It is as equally important as the dimension that simply means to be better citizens as much as we enrich our civil liberties; to strengthen our democratically established institutions. Another dimension is in protest of the shenanigans our leaders impose upon us because they will always seek ways to get around the system, to benefit them. Still another dimension is greater civic involvement to build better political parties, to actively participate in an election, to elect our chosen representatives. And another, we be citizens, employed to raise up families and to live.

Teddy Locsin gave a beautiful eulogy for Cory Aquino:

From the moment I came in from the airport and reported for duty, and she gave me in return the same smile she gave me on her deathbed, I never noticed… Not when I was with her in the campaign when she corrected me for not looking at the people I was waving at… Nor when I was with her in the presidential limousine looking intently, for her benefit, at the crowds at whom I waved… I never noticed anything. Except that I was with the only person that I would ever want to be with.

I certainly never noticed that I had left my anger behind. I don’t know how it happened. Except that Cory Aquino ennobled everyone who came near her. I have tried to say it publicly but never could finish. If you saw me as I felt myself to be, anyone would fall in love with me. I saw myself in that hospital room, a knight at the bedside of his dying sovereign, on the eve of a new Crusade, oblivious to the weight of the armor on his shoulders for the weight of the grief in his heart.

And because she always doubted my ability to be good for very long… Indeed, when my wife told Ballsy that I prayed the rosary at Lourdes for her mother’s recovery, Cory said, “Teddy Boy prayed the rosary? A miracle! I feel better already.” Because she doubted my capacity for self-reformation, she made it effortless for me by being herself. I did not notice that I was doing right by serving a woman who never did wrong. I am not sure how to take this moral self-discovery. It is so unlike myself. But if it will bring me before her again, I am happy.

Our sovereign is dead. Just as she did in her life, and we the people didn’t notice: she embodied People Power and continuously asked of us, moral self-discovery. Would it be too far to hope Cory prays for our nation’s self-reformation? We must embody the values she lived in life, that she aspired her knights and subjects to be during her presidency and expected those who have succeeded her in that office to hold.

Maybe we are Teddy Locin. One day, we will not know when we’ve left our anger behind.

This is the Permanent Revolution of People Power.
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1. image is from here and used under fair use.
2. a post “The Permanent Revolution of People Power” appeared on Filipino Voices before this. I wrote that but deleted that one because I found it incoherent when I reread it a few hours after posting. Consider this, Version 3.

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