grabe ang mga patutsada kay cory sa twitter on the eve of her 89th birthday. kesyo she was “just a housewife” and politically naive, thus the failure of her administration on many fronts.
but if cory had not run for president sa snap elections in 1986, kung hindi niya itinuloy ang laban ni ninoy na ibalik ang demokrasya, i daresay we would still be stuck, if not with the marcoses and vers, then with enrile and ramos and honasan, or all of the above, still under military rule and censorship at iba pang violations of human rights, democracy still out of reach.
cory was wondrously astounding. backed by the people’s massive support, she handled those macho bandidos quite bravely defiantly brilliantly and freaked the marcoses out of the palace in just 10 days of non-violent civil disobedience.
that her six years in office left much to be desired was not her fault but ours.
because our agenda was limited to marcos’s ouster and the restoration of freedom and democracy, akala natin ay tapos na ang laban — we had done our part, with flying colors yet, and we thought we were home free.
tayo ang naive. after 14 years of censored media, we just did not know enough about the true state of the nation (maybe we still don’t) and we simple-mindedly trusted that cory’s new government would set all wrong things right.
ayun pala, dapat ay hindi tayo agad bumitaw, if at all.
sabi nga ni eric gamalinda, on cory aquino, the day she died:
We wanted Cory Aquino to be strong so we could remain passive. We wanted her to save us so we could refuse to save ourselves. She was there so we could continue the infantile neurosis that has always sustained the Philippines’ need for a “guiding” power – God or a dictator, choose your daddy – and has always justified its corruption and poverty. She was, as so many predicted during the heyday of the people power revolution, our Joan of Arc. We knew we would burn her for allowing us to corrupt the vision we wanted her to sustain. We forgot so soon that she had achieved what no man in our supremely machismo-obsessed country had done – to get rid of the Marcoses. For that alone, we should be grateful. If the Philippines never rose from the “long nightmare” after she took over the presidency, we have no one to blame but ourselves. [emphasis mine]