Signs of Life

by Rosselle Tugade

When Corazon Aquino called for the resignation of the current administration and the moral restoration of the country about four years ago, the public barely budged from the fixity of banal modern life, mainly out of discomfort at the thought that another interruption in the everyday cycle of bureaucratic governmentality and putting everyday societal routines at risk through another upheaval. Soothsayers of mainstream media and popular analysts alike have declared since then that the Cory magic has faded into the recesses of memory of an era long gone.

These past five days, I became a scavenger for the sparks set into flight by that same magic. Being the daughter of a former hard-lined activist who joined the millions of people twenty-three years ago in a revolution which resounded all throughout the democratizing world, it was but natural for me to grow up to the tales of the tragedy that was Martial Law and the victory that was EDSA. I remember the sad eyes of my father which were now marked by the lines of time and change. Every story and recollection hungered my naive passion and imagination, fueling my dreams of fighting for my people.

When another uprising came about in 2001, I lamented the fact that I was too young to march in the streets as my father had during his youth. By that time, my father had also given up the arms of revolt and antagonism and became part of the convoluted space of public office. The architects of democracy were now its very own iconoclasts and twenty-three years later, the past was rendered frozen in the frame of unhistorical veneration and repetitive sound bytes. Twenty-three years later, I find the dreams which animated my childhood in a situation of perpetual risk from a threat created by my generation torn apart by the forces of production, cynicism, and forgetfulness.

The death of President Aquino cornered the Filipino people in such a situation: we are reminded of how we whitewashed our hopes, how fragile we have become in the face of change, how impatient we are at engaging in long struggles, and more importantly, how infantile our democracy is. After her tenure, President Aquino was the subject of criticism because of acts of injustices which transpired during her time: the refusal to repudiate national debt, the Mendiola Massacre, and the exclusion of Hacienda Luisita from the agrarian reform project. These, of course, were all very real but Cory was neither the best executive this country ever had. Amidst the criticism to her government, the spirit of forgetting intervenes to make the most of us surrender to the conditions of what we were born into, hence making us prisoners into another vicious cycle of stagnation. Cory Aquino’s life was a life of suffering, but it was a suffering with acceptance and suffering for a purpose. Her greatness certainly does not lie in her acuity at managing the bureaucracy; it rests within her courage and faith as an ordinary person to heed the call of democracy and freedom which are far larger than her own life.

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom, Hannah Arendt says. But in order to do so we must know first of which crimes against the country should be placed under the platform of justice. It is only then that we may proceed to making the guilty accountable and to growing more maturely from what has happened. Whatever fate the Philippines has experienced for the past two decades is surely not the result of a case of a quick forgive; it is rather the consequence of forgetfulness and an allergy to learning from the past.

As the rest of the Filipino nation poured out their sympathy for Cory, I cannot help but fear that what we have been grieving over is not the loss of a great woman and her extraordinary life. I fear that what we have seen is regression into the nostalgia of a golden age we enjoyed but did not care to fight for and preserve. The task then is for us to move out of the preference for forgetting and do so as how Cory did: inspire one another with the spirit of revolution and hope.

What struck me as I watched Cory’s casket being carried out of Manila Cathedral was not the grandeur of the proceedings. What will forever be etched in my spirit and fixed in my bank of hope are the laban signs piercing the air. The passion for struggling against a tyranny and indignity is still residing in the collective memory of the Filipino people: our challenge is to make it active and relevant to our present context.

Like Cory Aquino, I surrender my faith into the fight for genuine democracy; though I cannot hope to be as great as her, I am one with the spirit of EDSA in defending the nation from undemocratic forces and intents.

We should not allow the freedom she fought for and the value of the revolution she led die in vain.