EDSA Uno Dos Tres Quatro Cinco Cinco, Tres
I have the great (mis)fortune to live beside Epifanio De los Santos Avenue and work on Ayala Avenue, giving me a ringside seat to every misbegotten activist rally and every overdone police barricade staged over the last five years.
Walking along Ayala today, you'd think Manila was in the middle of an invasion. The whole avenue was in lockdown mode. Every shopfront had their metal barriers pulled down and sealed tight. The buildings not sheathed by aluminum or steel were swarming with workers busily boarding up their entrances and windows. Ayala Avenue - the thoroughfare of the rich, snooty, perfumed Kastilaloys which grip this country’s society by the balls - was soon to be overrun by the Binay Brigades, that horde of uneducated, unwashed, unemployed jologs howling for social justice, the opportunity to loot, or a little bit of both.
Manila is pungent with the stench of fear among the privileged, mingled with the uncertainty of this country’s sinking, shrinking middle class and the baying passions of angry mobs. Today shows us how the People Power phenomenon has failed this country. We’ve been shown what it is, taken to its logical extreme - nothing more than the unthinking desperation of people cynically manipulated by an elite invoking EDSA for their games of power, with no resolution for the deeper problems and the greater crises afflicting the Philippines.
The spirit of EDSA is dead? I don't mourn it one iota.
Why celebrate the first People Power Revolution? What do we wish to commemorate? We replaced a dictatorial kleptocracy for a democratically-elected one. We brought down a brilliantly malevolent lawyer and his cabal of greedy, corrupt, incompetent relatives and friends for a simple-minded Catholic housewife and HER cabal of greedy, corrupt, incompetent relatives and friends. The people changed their leaders, but they didn’t change their country. Five days of chanting songs and waving yellow banners is not enough to build strong, effective state institutions; it is not enough to give birth to better, more patriotic elite; and it is not enough to reverse our country’s decline into the laughingstock of Asia.
The chronic instability of our country, the aimlessness and uselessness of our government, can all be blamed squarely on People Power. The EDSA State, as Walden Bello succinctly labeled it, was built on rotten foundations - the belief that people can always assemble at the EDSA-Ortigas intersection (and lately, the Ayala-Paseo de Roxas intersection) and rally their way to a modern democracy. In a country of quick fixes, People Power is its ultimate expression.
Lest we forgot, that’s what put the midget in the Palace in the first place. It’s why we had a nearly-uncontrollable rioting mob almost sacking the country’s seat of power. It’s why we have a President publicly exposed on tape engaging in electoral fraud to the tune of a million votes. It’s why we have a state of emergency imposed on us again, twenty years after the end of the Martial Law regime. And it’s why the same people who called on People Power back then to unseat one rotten bastard are again invoking it now to unseat an even bigger bastard.
History repeats itself because People Power is not about the one thing we got right. It’s about the many things we keep getting wrong.
Walking along Ayala today, you'd think Manila was in the middle of an invasion. The whole avenue was in lockdown mode. Every shopfront had their metal barriers pulled down and sealed tight. The buildings not sheathed by aluminum or steel were swarming with workers busily boarding up their entrances and windows. Ayala Avenue - the thoroughfare of the rich, snooty, perfumed Kastilaloys which grip this country’s society by the balls - was soon to be overrun by the Binay Brigades, that horde of uneducated, unwashed, unemployed jologs howling for social justice, the opportunity to loot, or a little bit of both.
Manila is pungent with the stench of fear among the privileged, mingled with the uncertainty of this country’s sinking, shrinking middle class and the baying passions of angry mobs. Today shows us how the People Power phenomenon has failed this country. We’ve been shown what it is, taken to its logical extreme - nothing more than the unthinking desperation of people cynically manipulated by an elite invoking EDSA for their games of power, with no resolution for the deeper problems and the greater crises afflicting the Philippines.
The spirit of EDSA is dead? I don't mourn it one iota.
Why celebrate the first People Power Revolution? What do we wish to commemorate? We replaced a dictatorial kleptocracy for a democratically-elected one. We brought down a brilliantly malevolent lawyer and his cabal of greedy, corrupt, incompetent relatives and friends for a simple-minded Catholic housewife and HER cabal of greedy, corrupt, incompetent relatives and friends. The people changed their leaders, but they didn’t change their country. Five days of chanting songs and waving yellow banners is not enough to build strong, effective state institutions; it is not enough to give birth to better, more patriotic elite; and it is not enough to reverse our country’s decline into the laughingstock of Asia.
The chronic instability of our country, the aimlessness and uselessness of our government, can all be blamed squarely on People Power. The EDSA State, as Walden Bello succinctly labeled it, was built on rotten foundations - the belief that people can always assemble at the EDSA-Ortigas intersection (and lately, the Ayala-Paseo de Roxas intersection) and rally their way to a modern democracy. In a country of quick fixes, People Power is its ultimate expression.
Lest we forgot, that’s what put the midget in the Palace in the first place. It’s why we had a nearly-uncontrollable rioting mob almost sacking the country’s seat of power. It’s why we have a President publicly exposed on tape engaging in electoral fraud to the tune of a million votes. It’s why we have a state of emergency imposed on us again, twenty years after the end of the Martial Law regime. And it’s why the same people who called on People Power back then to unseat one rotten bastard are again invoking it now to unseat an even bigger bastard.
History repeats itself because People Power is not about the one thing we got right. It’s about the many things we keep getting wrong.