Chasing a Revolution

by Carmela Aquino

Some years from now, they might write about us just as they wrote about the baby boomers from the sixties, whose parents wore bands around their heads and marched in anti-war and civil rights protests.  They’ll bring up photographs from the eighties of miting de avances, prayer rallies and EDSA, and in the crowd wearing aviators and holding rosaries, our parents will be there.  Many of us were born in these tumultuous times, from the efforts of thousands who believed—if nothing else, we should have an inalienable right to be free.

They will call us the revolutionary babies, those who grew up out of the eighties on stories of EDSA, of Cory and Ninoy.  We met Marcos in textbooks, vilified grandly as far as dictators go, and we reveled in rumors of the extent of Imelda’s sordid extravagance.  In a time of relative peace, it was easy to grow up on such legends, and so we did.   

On the anniversary of the revolution each year, we are reminded of how lucky we were to have been born now.  Born free.  But I could not grasp the significance of it all until much later.  I had read Bonifacio, Rizal, del Pilar, everything that history required of me.  I had learned to hate the idea of graft and corruption, pork barrel, the trapo, and traditional politics even before I understood what these meant.  Like everyone who had grown up studying sibika, I had come to know the long drawn-out Filipino struggle by heart.  But what of it?

When 2001 came, and with it, another EDSA, I watched almost mesmerized at the turn of events that would have the country rising up in another kind of revolution. As the country stayed up for the impeachment trials and watched with horror as the Senate voted to keep an envelope sealed, a terrible feeling of being powerless against a system of blatant corruption would give way to indignation.  For those of us who felt it for the first time, there would be no experience like EDSA, no other venue in which we would feel democracy more at work than ever.

But today, years later, it is easy to feel betrayed by the revolutions.  One cannot help but feel disillusioned with the promise of a new beginning, when we’ve cycled in and out of the same broken political system for decades.  We were too young to remember the seven coups that haunted Cory after EDSA I, but we were there when Erap was pardoned.  The revolutions that promised both an end and a beginning had borne nothing. Except for us, and we had already tried to love the country but had nothing to show for it.

We could have born any other time but we were born then. 1986. Is it possible none of it means anything?

My dad, who wrote to live, always told me to search for the questions, and so I did. He wrote about my grandfather’s war because he needed to know who he was. Someday, I would write about my father’s war. For now, I looked away from the revolution for the answers. I went away to find myself in college and studied Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, and all their speeches. I wanted to understand what it was all about.

Words, words, words.

I looked for Edsa memoirs and read as I’d never read Philippine history before. Finally, I read Ninoy.

It amazed me to find what redemptive power his rhetoric had. And what words could do to spur a nation to action. I spent a year trying to answer how my parents and their parents could have found such potency in Aquino’s vision. Aquino represented a paradox, greater in death than he ever was in life. He was iconic. Larger than life. I like to think his death began the revolution.

Afterwards, I would never forget the singular fascination I had with the workings of our democracy.

“Loving a nation is hard to do,” Jessica Hagedorn wrote.  

We are both our greatest cynics as we both our generation’s greatest idealists.

I came home two Christmases ago, on a China Airlines flight, by way of Taipei.  How it happened that I followed Ninoy’s route on the last leg of his journey home was purely circumstantial.  On the day I bought my ticket, it just so happened to be the only itinerary left.  That day, I thought—what a wonder.  To be trailing in his footsteps, chasing after the same dream, and to be alive and truly, living it.

Each year that we grow older is a year farther from the revolution.  Is it possible we are the answer?