We share the Catholic world’s fervent prayers for Pope Francis, who is in critical condition for the second day now due to his deteriorating lungs. Before he was advised to slow down, the Pope led the celebration of the Jubilee of the World of Communications in January at the Vatican, where Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Rappler CEO Maria Ressa was invited to speak (in case you missed it, watch it here).
Pope Francis has provided the moral backbone for the fight against disinformation, rallied Catholics in supporting human rights and denouncing the unending wars in Gaza and Ukraine — and even suggested an international study to look into the possible genocide of the Palestinian people.
Francis’ courage and commitment to the truth has inspired Filipino Catholics, and they showed this last week when Catholic universities and schools defied President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. by declaring a holiday on Tuesday, February 25. It’s the 39th anniversary of the 1986 EDSA People Power Revolution that toppled the President’s father, the late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos, and catapulted the late president Corazon Aquino to the presidency. The Marcos family was forced to flee Malacañang on February 25, 1986.
Since becoming president in 2022, Marcos has played around with the nation’s remembrance of EDSA.
- In February 2023, the President moved the celebration of the anniversary to February 24 (a Friday then) by declaring it a special non-working holiday, invoking “holiday economics.” Yet, Marcos surprised many when his office sent a wreath of flowers to the People Power Monument, which was built to commemorate the four-day revolution, and offered his “hand of reconciliation” in a speech.
- The Marcos family drama unraveled that early. His elder sister Imee Marcos fumed and said she could not stomach any EDSA celebration.
- Last year, the government chose not to declare February 25 a holiday and muted its commemoration. And it’s not a holiday again this year — as Marcos barnstorms the provinces to campaign for his handpicked senatorial candidates for the May midterm polls.
The EDSA narrative is being flipped for the midterm polls by another dictator, former president Rodrigo Duterte, who, while campaigning for his senatorial bets in Cebu, had the gall to warn the nation that Marcos 2.0 is “like his father” and will eventually declare martial law.
Not that we’re discounting such a possibility, but this is worse than the pot calling the kettle black. Duterte damaged institutions, corrupted the police and the military, killed thousands in the name of his drug war, and attacked the media in his six years in office. Without declaring martial law.
Today, Duterte and his base project themselves as the opposition — launching their senatorial slate at Club Filipino, where Cory Aquino took her oath after EDSA; holding “indignation” rallies here and there; blasting Marcos for corruption and incompetence.
Where is the opposition, anyway, those whose ideals were born at EDSA? They’re apparently torn over whether they’re yellow or pink or somewhere in between, making them… “in-betweeners” in these elections, to borrow one of our reporters’ quips during a story huddle.
It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that denying EDSA — and what it means to Filipinos — is a curse, especially to those who either gained from its ideals or got thrown out because of them. As Rappler Thought Leader Antonio Montalvan II points out: “Collective memory comes from people…. But we are not the Marcoses — EDSA does not torment our collective memory. EDSA represents the Filipino’s happy days. Happy days are not better off forgotten but days memorialized as historical remembrance.”
To erase EDSA, Montalvan says, is “mission impossible.”
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