Remembering Cory, Remembering EDSA

I was a freshman in college when the EDSA People Power Revolution happened. Days before during the canvassing of the snap poll returns, I remember my fraternity had an Anti-Fraud, Anti Dictatorship motorcade within UP and up to Batasan, but the atmosphere was eerily silent. When people power ignited I went to EDSA together with my sister, my brother-in-law and one of their officemates - they were all employed at a government agency then. We were there from the start, until the oath-taking of Cory Aquino at Club Filipino in Greenhills. Without the convenience of mobile phones and the internet, I wonder whether organized forces had time to regroup. People just went to EDSA. The radio was the main means to keep informed of developments.

Twenty-three years hence, with failed economic development and fucked-up politics, the spirit of EDSA dissipates. The Marcos period appears more and more benign, especially to those otherwise not directly or immediately harmed by the dictatorship. Cory's passing away reminds us what EDSA stood for, and what the dictatorship did to the Filipino people's freedoms and security.

One problem the People Power Revolution had was that it had no program beyond a return to democracy. In the economy, the economists with their prescription of free markets and dismatling and demonizing the state, in alliance with international financial institutions, had an open field. We now reap the results: a formal democracy hobbled by failed economics and bad government.

Still we thank Cory, and the genuine opposition who struggled against the Marcos dictatorship. The economy is for all of us to address, the government is for all of us to rebuild, the economists for all of us to reject, and Gloria Arroyo for all of us to hate. But People Power was there to reclaim for us our freedoms to do so. What endears Cory, the person, to us is her consistency in being on the side of our freedoms.

We will remember.