Category: people power

noise barrage 1978, first People Power show

The people first made their presence known, loud and clear, five years into martial rule, on the 6th of April 1978. It was the eve of elections for Members of Parliament who would sit in the Interim Batasang Pambansa or National Assembly. Under pressure from the U.S. government, Marcos had allowed Ninoy to head a new party, Lakas ng Bayan (LABAN) and from his prison cell to run for a seat in opposition to KBL’s frontrunner Imelda. A month before elections, Defense Minister Enrile went on TV and charged Ninoy of being both a communist and a CIA agent.

Ninoy demanded equal TV time and got it. It was his first ever appearance on public television in almost six years and the nation was enthralled (the streets were empty, everyone was indoors watching TV) and shocked at how much weight the once chubby senator had lost. For people who voted him into the Senate in ’71 there was a poignant sense, long overdue, of how terribly he must have suffered, and continued to suffer, under Marcos rule. And yet the man had lost neither his ardor nor his bite and the people took little convincing that Enrile lied, Ninoy was neither a communist nor a CIA agent.

Except for that one TV appearance, Ninoy’s campaign was left to his wife Cory and seven-year old Kris, whose rallying cry was, “Help my Daddy come home!”  On April 6, the eve of elections, Ninoy’s secret admirers from left, right, and center responded under cover of darkness with the historic noise barrage. At 7:00 P.M. on the dot, we took to Manila’s streets yelling, “Laban!” and making the L sign with thumb and index finger, accompanied by car horns shrieking, pots and pans banging, whistles blowing, sirens wailing, church bells pealing, alarm bells ringing, never mind if the dreaded military picked us all up. We had no idea then that it was organized by Communist Party leader Filemon Lagman a.k.a. Popoy,  and if we had known, we would have joined anyway just to spite the dictator.

The noise barrage did not win Ninoy the election that was marked by massive cheating, but it told him in no uncertain terms that there were Filipinos out there like him, anonymous but increasing in numbers, who were yearning for freedom.  These people were not to surface for another five years. [EDSA UNO (2013) “Marcos Times” pp 24-25]

March for Our Lives, ‘78 Laban Noise Barrage, and the fight vs. Duterte

“facebook is the new EDSA” ?!? LOL

this is to disabuse the duterte diehard who, at the senate’s jan 30 fake news hearing, dared suggest, propound, push the notion that facebook is the new EDSA.  it is NOT.  and i’m glad, on the one hand, that no senator dignified the statement by making patol —  committee chair poe was more interested in how many followers the guy had, even promising that from 30,000 it would be more than double that after the hearing.

on the other hand, it makes me wonder if it was her underhanded way of making patol sort of?  as in, you know, it’s all about the numbers?  as in 60 million fb users! say ng diehard, which is more believable, i must say, than ressa’s 97% of pinoys (!) because that’s like saying even the poorest of the poor? are online a lot?  with what, the 4Ps pantawid cash?  but i digress.

even if it were true that practically all pinoys (except the very young and the very old?) are active online, such great numbers would far from an edsa make.  EDSA 86 was about throngs of unarmed people gathering in the streets, united behind, and ready to die for, a common cause: ousting marcos.  on facebook there is no getting behind a common cause.  duterte diehards are forever bickering among themselves while the various opposition factions can’t get their act together on anything under the sun.

and if the duterte diehard was thinking of the arab spring revolts in tunisia and egypt in early 2010 that we thought were waged and won on and through facebook and twitter, think again.  facebook was more like the GPS lang.  read So, Was Facebook Responsible for the Arab Spring After All? 

… Facebook is what guided the protests, but the true vehicle for change was the protests themselves.

… In the end, no matter the importance of the online tools, “history happened on the streets” … But how those streets became flooded by so many, well, it wasn’t random, and social media’s role boils down to two simple but central accomplishments: First, Facebook and elsewhere online is where people saw and shared horrifying videos and photographs of state brutality that inspired them to rebel. Second, these sites are where people found out the basic logistics of the protests — where to go and when to show up.

in EDSA 86 everyone was on the same page — pro-marcos peeps knew enough to stay away because they would be booed out, like nora aunor was, just because she had been identified with the marcoses at one time or another; in fairness, bumalik siya anyway and eventually got through to enrile in camp aguinaldo and was welcomed with open arms.

but wait, meron din nga palang fake news sa EDSA!  on day 3, monday 24 feb, soon after the defection of sotelo’s 15th strike wing, when fvr and enrile had opened the gates of crame to let the people in, there came the BIG NEWS from june keithley via radyo bandido that the marcoses had left the palace.  nakoryente si ketly, but so were fvr and cory who also received, and believed, the news.

it was a psy-war kind of thing, say ni fvr after.  the hope probably was that the fake news would send the crowds home — tapos na ang boksing — leaving only enrile and fvr and RAM in crame so that the marines (positioned in camp aguinaldo’s golf course) could proceed to bomb them without hurting civilians.

fortuitously, the crowds grew larger in number instead, and there was dancing in the streets until an hour or so later when it was confirmed that the marcoses were still holed up in the palace, and it was back to the barricades, no prob.  lalo pa ngang dumami ang tao sa EDSA.  it was as if the people smelled victory and were bent on making the fake news true.  and they did, some 30 hours later.

in that sense, ok din ang fake news, like when it gives you something great to aspire for?

Towards A Culturally Evolved Alternative

JORGE ARAGO
(1943 – 2011)

People power in 1986 restored to Philippine society the “democratic space” which had been previously occupied by the running dogs of martial law.

But as in previous turnovers of power in our society, that space has been hogged by the elite and its own running dogs, to the exclusion of particular groups: the teacher-student, the art-media and the scientific communities.

This is a call for these sectors to come together and identify their choices as the unacknowledged advance guard of modern development in our society. These groups have a significant role to play in the context of the evolutionary path that the Filipinos have taken. They reject the revolution proposed by the Left, the divisive fundamentalism in the South, the chronic opportunism of traditional politics, and the apathy of an unknown number. They have not lifted us from poverty and are not likely to do so in the context of the environmental degradation that backdrops all human activity today.

Artists and media practitioners, teachers and their students on all levels, scientists and research-and-development teams in academe and the private sector have the skills, training and intellectual apparatus to cope with the effects of globalization. For far too long now they have been non-entities lumped under so-called “civil society”, their voices lost or without effect in the competition among NGO‟s fighting for a proliferation of uncoordinated interests.

They also have the potential to counter the entry in the political arena of forces which threaten to bring us back to dark times. These are the many religious groups who propose themselves as alternatives to corrupt leaderships. Swept up by disaffection with the so-called higher moral concerns of the traditional church, they betray origins in the same configuration of exploitation in conditions that existed before.

Now is the time for artists and scientists and academe to come together and create a concrete democratic and unifying basis for mutuality in our society that will guide development that is in step with the development of the rest of the global community, while using distinct Filipino methods, skills and talents we have painstakingly evolved through all the regimes under which we have worked.

Stalking EDSA — Coming out

7/7

Late October, I was bracing myself for a final stretch of sustained work, taking in Bosworth and the latest from Enrile (even if only for the endnotes), when Elmer Ordoñez emailed and gave me something else to think about.  An invitation to speak as panelist in Philippine PEN’s conference come December, endorsed by PEN Chair Bien Lumbera; I could speak on Enrile’s memoir if I wanted, in a panel on social commentary. The overall theme: The Writer as Public Intellectual. I had no such illusion. But the writer as social commentator, yes, and the opportunity to speak out on history and memoirs and truth-telling proved irresistible. It was a different kind of writing, of course, an essay for reading out loud.  It was a first for me, as it was a first foray into literati territory.  Butterflies aside, I had a blast, thank you!

The new year 2013 was all about getting the final manuscript done ASAP, I needed to move on. The February anniversary was special though. The Palace communications office tweeted the events of the four days as they unfolded, based on my “compiled timeline,” hashtag #EDSA27.  Never mind “compiled,” it was acknowledgement enough from the seat of government.  Also, anniversary stories yielded Rene Saguisag’s first-ever account of being “Present at the Creation,” a speech he gave in a Club Filipino affair, excerpts of which were published in his Manila Times column.  I introduced myself via email to ask for a copy of the whole speech; next thing we knew, he was writing me a blurb.

As with Revo Routes, published independently with the help of family, I was loath to give up my EDSA Uno copyright, no matter how temporarily, or to deal with a publisher (or editor, maybe lawyers) whose concerns might be different from mine. (I missed Eggie.) Just the same, in March I sent a PDF of the EDSA Uno manuscript to the head of a publishing house who had asked me about it once and to whom I had promised first dibs – I was being optimistic, maybe I could swing a rare deal, get it distributed nationwide at a reasonable price  – but the reply was quick (two hours and twenty-six minutes): “Serious inventory problems … not open to new submissions this year.”  Fine. I would do it myself, just put it out there, the universe would provide.

The challenge of indie publishing is not so much the cost – family and friends helped defray some of that – as it is the compulsion to come up with something perfect.  It’s a stressful creative process, working with book and cover designers, making choices and decisions about how the book would look, inside and out, no-turning-back. For the cover I had always wanted to use the artwork by Butch aka Godofredo U. Stuart Jr. posted on stuartxchange.com’s “EDSA Works”: graphic illustrations of EDSA 86, Edsa Dos, and Edsa Tres that captured the similarities and differences, simply and starkly, in three frames. Joel and Katrina  didn’t think it could happen, ‘twould be such a crowded cover; and if I wanted EDSA Uno more prominent, as it should be, then how small would Dos and Tres get.  But Mervin Malonzo, he who came up with the Revo Routes cover of Elias straddling the crocodile from just photos of the sculpture, surprised us yet again; he liked it that I was specific about what I wanted and he had no problem tweaking tweaking tweaking, and it was quite a trip for me and the kids, seeing the cover morph in accord with a shared aesthetic.

In July we finally went to press.  We were thinking an August 21 launch in memory of Ninoy’s assassination but then the Inquirer broke the Php10-Billion pork barrel kickback scandal, and August saw multisectoral protests rocking the nation complete with a million-people march in the works.  Suddenly I didn’t want to call attention to EDSA Uno the book. Those were testy times. The President had enough problems.  Anyway, who would have the time to read.  We had a small September launch instead, more a matter of ritual than pomp, an excuse to celebrate with close family and friends, finally I was done with EDSA!

The next one is for a historian to write; or historians from different schools of thought, para masaya.  I’m coming from a serious review by a young professor who wishes I had done more with the material, stuff a social scientist would do, such as set my reading of the four days in the context of some academic theory or intellectual framework, go beyond my pagninilay-nilay kind of socio-political commentary.  It’s like saying I should have written EDSA Uno for the academics and not for the reading public. And, oh, how he derides, scorns, mocks the very idea that Halley’s Comet, solar flares, and the sun-moon alignment could have had any kind of connection, other than illogical and miraculous, to things happening here on earth, as though human life were free of biophysical influences and, alone among living things, impervious to cosmic cycles and revolutions.

I thank the heavens that otherwise 2014 has been upbeat (even if the Palace moved the EDSA celebration to Cebu).  February 21 I attended my first pocket lectures symposium, also the first-ever symposium on the EDSA Revolution, presented by the Philippine Historical Association and the GSIS Museo ng Sining; I was asked to say a few words to a roomful of future history teachers. February 22 I had my first sit-down with a book club (Flips Flipping Pages) of young people who had actually read my book and loved it and were eager to help spread the word – children’s books? comics? – even, who dared hope that the pork barrel scandal might resurrect the spirit of EDSA Uno. In mid-May came the invitation to contribute to this anthology, another first for this non-academic, and in truth I’m beginning to feel like EDSA is now stalking me. ***