No Tears.

Corazon Aquino is dead, and — especially since I’m writing this in the Philippines — I’m in the midst of a fit of national mourning. It’s all over the place: the funeral procession on TV, people wearing yellow T-shirts, banners on buildings, tweets and Facebook status updates, constant newspaper coverage, the lines of mourners, tributes from world leaders. Even Pope Benedict XVI has lauded Aquino’s “courageous commitment to the freedom of the Filipino people, her firm rejection of violence and intolerance”.

Yet I can’t seem to feel any sorrow over her death. Quite frankly, I’m a little disgusted by all these encomiums and how easily people forget.

This is not to say that I’m some sort of heartless grump — quite the contrary — but I’m hoping that this blog entry may serve as more of an explanation. It really has to do, I think, with where I was twenty-three years ago, about my emotional maturity and my political education. It has to do with what I remember.

On the night of February 22nd, 1986 — just after Cardinal Sin exhorted Radio Veritas listeners to flock to EDSA — I was under a slowly-spinning disco ball at my high school senior prom in Los Baños, Laguna.

I don’t remember what we danced to anymore. (I’m guessing I must have slow-danced to “Careless Whisper” and “Crazy for You” — but who with, I can’t remember. Sorry.) What I do recall is the look of panic on the faces of parents who had come to the UPLB Student Union to pick us up — not because it was prom night and high school hormones were raging, but because of what was happening in Manila.

I’m not sure I fully understood their anxiety. For someone like myself who grew up in the provinces, and would go to college in my hometown a few months later, Manila, and its politics, had always seemed really far away.

Of course I knew about the assassination of Ninoy Aquino, the disappeared students, the spiraling economic crisis precipitated by the looting of public coffers by the Marcoses and their cronies. I knew even then that the Philippine Daily Inquirer and Malaya were to be far more trusted than the Manila Bulletin or the Daily Express. But to someone who was barely fifteen, Marcos was simply an abstracted, enemy figure to be feared, the ailing man whose face I saw on billboards and television all my life.

The “L” sign was merely that — a sign — and Cory Aquino was probably even more remote to me, the widow of someone who seemed to me far more important — someone whose speeches I could actually watch and read, someone whose story (his exile, his incredible assassination, his funeral) was more comprehensible to a young teenager like myself. Cory was the woman in yellow, whose candidacy in the Presidential snap elections announced in 1985 seemed characterized only by the mere fact that she was not Marcos. Back in those dark days of the Marcos dictatorship, that was enough.

Cory Aquino was brave, yes, but it had always seemed to me back then that her husband was braver. And so were all those people who went to EDSA that week.

Then college happened. I was a Communication Arts major in July of 1986, entering a more adult world that seemed burnished by the glow of freedom and peace, all of which Cory represented. This period was, in hindsight, a precarious moment for the Left, having lost their momentum by boycotting the Presidential elections earlier that year.

But what a time that was. UP Los Baños had, at that point, a reputation as a “breeding ground” for “leftist” activists and “communist sympathizers” — to which I reply now, So freakin what? Classmates were going on exposure trips in Central Luzon. Joey Ayala and Inang Laya would perform regularly on campus. The League of Filipino Students, bless them, was organizing protest rallies almost monthly, agitating for the implementation of socialized tuition fees and the land reform that Cory Aquino had promised. I participated in none of these activities — not because I was too burgis to do so, but because I knew my parents would never approve.

I wrote for my high school paper, and so it seemed natural, especially as a ComArts major, that I would join the college newspaper as well. When I first arrived at the UPLB Perspective as a staff writer*, the masthead was slightly in disarray; the editor-in-chief, Zelda Soriano, had just run off to the hills, and wouldn’t reemerge until much later, when she sat at the negotiations table with the military alongside Satur Ocampo and Tony Zumel. One time I passed by the office and “Ka Roger” Rosal was sitting there, being interviewed. You know, people like that. I was probably the most politically moderate of the staffers, but it was the beginning of a learning process.

I must have seemed hopelessly burgis and prudish to the “P“, though, and I probably still would. For starters, back then I refused to drink or smoke, being a Sunday school teacher, Bible Study leader, and the youth coordinator for our church at that time. (Long story.) Our Monday editorial meetings, were held up on the second floor of the Student Union, the smoke in the room practically obscuring the words “Committed Journalism” written in chalk on the board. (A pack of Marlboro Lights was de rigueur for LB activists at the time, as was a woven backpack and a sweaty red tubao scarf around the neck — perfect for covering the mouth and nose for anonymity and protection against tear gas.)

Cigarette smoke aside, the people at the “P” were great. Rita Villadiego — I vividly remember her curly hair — stepped up as editor-in-chief to replace Ka Zelda. Teddy Casiño, fresh from a stint as a NAMFREL volunteer, carried the biggest camera I’d ever seen. A few months later, an intense but funny Juliet Labog joined our staff as a writer. I know where all three of them ended up — both Taritz and Juliet at the Inquirer, and Teddy at the House of Representatives — but Dodie Gualberto, Christopher Torno, Dacky Dacanay, my former classmates Paul Pablico and John Gonzales — where are you pipol now, and would you even remember me? (I accidentally ran into a former staffer, Irwin Melo, just yesterday, and totally didn’t recognize him!)

But ultimately, the “P” was eye-opening. I slowly began to understand why stories about random engkuwentros with the military, efforts to mobilize students to protest against tuition fee hikes, and increased militarization in the countryside were all important and all connected. And I slowly began to realize how Cory Aquino, that paragon of virtue seemingly ruling by mandate of a Catholic God, and the people in her government, wasn’t the saint and icon of democracy that everyone seemed to think she was.

And then, the Mendiola Massacre, January 22, 1987 — not even a year after the largely peaceful People Power Revolution had passed. I remember it like I was punched in the gut. The news spread like wildfire: one of the popular campus student leaders, and a guy I was more than nodding acquaintances with, Bong Manlulu, had been shot in the head. I remember how we at the Perspective distributed handwritten leaflets, hot off the mimeograph the next day, all over campus. (I think we may have erroneously reported him dead, alas. But we all waited constantly for updates about his recovery, since he really was shot in the head. He’s fine now; I think he’s even a friend of mine on Facebook.)

But I remember the chaos and confusion in Los Banos, the people crying when they heard the news. I remember Teddy at the steps of the Humanities Building — a megaphone in his hand, tears streaming down his cheeks — telling a shocked crowd of students about the shots fired, the people screaming, the bodies on the ground. Teddy was there; Bong was there; these were people I knew. Mendiola was still far away from Los Baños, but now it was real.

It was perhaps later that evening (or later that week) that I saw the footage on television. I think that was when I cried — not at the sight of the bodies of farmers being carried by their comrades, but by the hundreds of tsinelas left behind by the peasants as they ran in sheer terror. They weren’t the same people at EDSA the year before. These were the people, merely exercising their democratic power, and the state, led by that same woman who had firmly rejected violence and intolerance, had left them dead on the ground.

—–

*I honestly remember very little about what I wrote for the Perspective, which means they couldn’t have been very interesting. But I do recall writing a newspaper page-long screed against the utter uselessness of citizens’ military training — this couldn’t have thrilled my former high school classmates, who were junior Cadet Officers along with me (another long story) — and being responsible for a good amount of our annual April Fools’ parody issue called the Defective, which someone later taped all over the Humanities Building walls with “A WASTE OF STUDENTS’ MONEY!” painted in red.

—–

[EDIT: I have a thousand-odd blog posts in my Google Reader I haven't gotten to, but I at least wanted to point out a couple of related entries well-worth reading: here's "geek", at her blog Trippings, who writes about Cory as a national symbol and what this might mean outside of Luzon, i.e., very differently. And here's Barb (we were emailing about this earlier), who writes about how the fact that "Filipinos were capable of the opposite of invisibility and silence" was brought home to her in a Catholic high school in Hayward in February 1986, and which also features a characteristically erudite comment by Oca Campomanes.]

Popularity: 8% [?]