By JOSE PAOLO S. DELA CRUZ
If Instagram and Facebook were already a thing 37 years ago, then these are probably the images that would have flooded everybody’s timelines from from Feb. 22 to 25. For on these days, millions of Filipinos gathered in EDSA to change history. And with steely resolve, prayers and not a single drop of blood, they prevailed — walking away in the end with their heads held high and their rights restored.
People who were either too young or weren’t born yet in February 1986 might think that the abrupt change in government at that time could simply be explained away as the result of a “family feud between the Marcoses and the Aquinos,” as one prominent politician so cynically put it. Some may ascribe it to a “soft” coup led and supported by the then military establishment.
What many seem to forget is this: the historic event, which soon inspired similar peaceful uprisings all over the world, was the culmination of a 14-year struggle by the Filipino people under the yoke of tyranny, oppression, mismanagement and corruption. A long and arduous struggle that began with the declaration of martial law in 1972, leading to the death of our democracy and the birth of People Power, which later saw an overstaying dictator being booted from power more than a decade later.
As PeopleAsia editor-in-chief Joanne Rae Ramirez once wrote, “The rich, the poor, they all gathered on EDSA, the former bringing food, enough to feed an army, the latter bringing all they had to lose in the name of freedom and democracy — their very lives.”
From the unarmed nuns clutching their rosaries who stopped gun-carrying soldiers in tanks, to civilians who pushed back the tanks with tears in their eyes — all the way up to the uniformed men and women who didn’t push back, those four days in Edsa was a peaceful revolution in every sense of the word. Some may even call it a miracle.
Aside from changing the course of Philippine history by restoring democracy in the country, EDSA, too, shaped world history, as it is believed to have inspired Prague’s Velvet Revolution, which in turn, inspired the fall of the Berlin Wall.
And here we are, 37 years later, remembering that one moment in time when guns and steels and bullets yielded to prayers, hope and the will of the people.
