Research Paper. People Power Revolution Essay

For more than a decade now, many Filipinos conduct trekked to EDSA to commemorate the anniversary of the February 1986 People Power Revolution, marking the get down of President Marcos administration.This year the customary rituals ecumenical invocations, on-site masses, eloquent political speeches, martial marches, colorful parades, star-studded shows and other diversionary entertainment will be performed as before. The celebration will probably take a more subdued tone as the country, as well as the region, reels from the economic slowdown and degraded challenges to erstwhile secure political orders.For most people who persist in joining the EDSA celebration, few are inspired to seek its historical or ghostly con nonations. It appears sufficient that this historic stretch of the national highway is instantarily transformed into a convenient amusement park.After all, people who live precariously from moment to moment, as more Filipinos now must, are not inclined to burden th emselves contemplating the depressing state of the nation. Better the light entertainment of the moment than the serious formulation which a continuing sense of national purpose and civic responsibility demands.Yet, amidst todays celebration of the 1986 People Power Revolution, one really ought to communicate into the meaning of this historic mass action, the original context within which it might be more fully appreciated and the painful but now induce perspective for assessing the current relevance of this experience.In 1986, a critical mass of Filipinos found Marcos and the political order he created sufficiently revolting and, throwing their support freighter a small band of desperate military coup plotters, forced the ailing dictator, his family and his subalterns to flee the country.The popular revolt succeeded in toppling Marcos rule, but lacking a clearly radical ideology, a revolutionary program of authorities, arevolutionary political leadership and indeed a revoluti onary mass base, the rising could not go much beyond ridding the country of the hated Marcos and dismantling the formal political infrastructure of his dictatorship.The leaders and other supporters of the people power revolution could have worked hard to give substance to this media-projected identity. Indeed the momentum of the popular revolt could have been sustained and immediately magnified had a series of progressive government policies been launched and implemented with revolutionary rigor by the successor regime.These policies included people empowerment particularly at the local level, national brotherhood embracing the traditionally marginalized and even the main rebel groups, recovery of plundered public resources and relentless pursuit of those responsible for the rape of an entire nation across several generations.The revolutionary possibilities indicated by these early policies of the advanced government however would remain illusory. Traditional vested interest grou ps (e.g. landed wealth, those in business and the religious) as well as politicized new players in Philippine politics (e.g. the military) developed more than enough political stakes in the post-Edsa political arrangements and predictably shirked from the revolutionary thrusts of these early policies.As had happened so often in the history of most nations, collaborationist Philippine elites thought it best to undertake a politics of restoration where their primacy would be guaranteed rather than to care in the building of a new and, for the historically privileged, a problematic, even outrightly perilous democratic regime. Most leaders of the 1986 revolt understandably settled on the reassuring shores of oligarchic history rather than embark on the uncharted, revolutionary seas searching for the proverbial terra incognita, a conceivably democratic national destiny.National unification was pursued without any critical attention being paid to what elements could legitimately be incl uded in or excluded from nationallife. Thus economic plunderers and scoundrels mechanically were inserted as integral parts of post-Marcos transition.It did not matter much, that for more than two decades, they had abused and looted the nation. National reconciliation was similarly uncritically pursued and perpetrators of august crimes, including economic brigandage and human rights abuses, were courted without requiring them to undertake significant restitution to the victims of their rapacity while they retained control of government offices at various levels.No revolutionary opening move could survive amidst policies which glossed over the antithetical character of the nations traitors and its patriots, the victimizers and their victims, the plunderers and the plundered.A nation that is successfully misled by its leaders into adopting this convenient and self-serving ambiguity learns to promptly forgive and hence to also easily forget. Without a clear memory, no nation can hop e to sustain an irreversible revolution, the only truly current path to its deserved destiny.The historical record since 1986 reflects the implacable effects of reformist policies which do not basically alter the substantive character of Philippine ball club and its core political system. Economic and political inequities remain at high levels, with poverty engulfing probably more than 6 years percent of the nations families (this count is often registered in academic surveys although the governments own estimates would improve this profile, cutting down the estimated poverty incidence rate to less than 40 percent by 1997).Despite the much touted improvements in national economic performance particularly between 1992 and 1997, Philippine per capita income remains low in relation to countries like Thailand and Malaysia and only slightly better than Indonesia within the region. Independent surveys also indicate that gains made by the national economy in the last 60 have been largel y limited to the better-off and had not significantly trickled down to the poorerFilipinos.Politically, local governments have gained more autonomy, the oligarchic and dynastic characteristics of the political system continue to be apparent and are documented in various studies looking into electoral financing, candidate profiles and public official pedigrees.Systemic graft and corruption remain at fairly high levels. Thirteen years after the EDSA Revolution, a new presidents public speeches would continue to denounce routinely hoodlums in robes (those in the judiciary), hoodlums in uniform (those in the military and the police) as well as all other plain hoodlums in and out of government service. All would be warned in his inaugural address not to test his presidential resolve to combat graft and corruption. (Almost a year into his own presidency, it appears that some of his own determination political aides have been hard of hearing at his inauguration).One could continue documen ting the agitating features of Philippine political history after 1986. One could explore the serious challenges of criminality to public safety (with about 40 percent at least of the people feeling unsafe whether in their own homes or in the streets of their own neighborhood), or of dissident groups defying public order (the CPP-NPA-NDF communist threat and the Muslim Islamic Liberation Front) or the politicization of purportedly neutral government institutions such as the judiciary and the military, among others.All these are painful images of a current reality emphatically belying any claim that a political or socioeconomic revolution was indeed precipitated at EDSA. Yet one more image remains and perhaps it is this one that might serve to sufficiently profane another critical mass and another generation of Filipinos toward a much more authentic revolutionary awakening.Criminals do appear to have a obsession to return to the scene of their crimes. The national plunderers are ba ck in business, in all the influential sectors of Philippine society, in government, the private sector and even inmany of the pseudo-organizations of civil society. Their dramatic presence, their predictable forays into the nations patrimony and their subsequent arrogant posturings could re-ignite the publics fading memories of a previous regimes brutal political repression and tyrannical rule. A better-organized, better-informed and more truly revolutionary consciousness could be facilitated by the resurgence of these people who treated the Philippines as their private looting grounds for more than two decades. Then, like the devil in Goethes Faust, they may yet philosophically pronounce when asked for their identity I am he who while ever conspiring to do evil somehow manage to effect good.The lessons of 1986 and other earlier possible turning points in Philippine history are relatively unambiguous. Revolts do not necessarily make for revolutionary outcomes, at best on for revolu tionary say-so. In the case of the 1986 Revolution, that potential was aborted. Marcos was deposed as a political ruler, but the political system which spawned him was not irreversibly destroyed and may even now be resurgent.The final lesson of EDSA has commodious been suspected by democratic sympathizers, although there have been few validations of their thesis. A democratic revolution cannot be initiated or sustained by self-serving elites. moreover an enlightened, self-serving citizenry can reliably initiate and sustain an enduring democracy.