Research Paper. People Power Revolution Essay

For more(prenominal) than a decade today, galore(postnominal) Filipinos have trekked to EDSA to commemorate the anniversary of the February 1986 People Power Revolution, marking the remove of President Marcos authorities.This year the customary rituals ecumenical invocations, on-site kittyes, eloquent policy-making speeches, martial marches, colorful parades, star-studded shows and another(prenominal) diversionary entertainment will be performed as before. The celebration will probably take a more subdued t unrivaled as the bucolic, as well as the region, reels from the scotch slow peck and disruptive challenges to erst maculation secure policy-making rules of orders.For most pile who persist in joining the EDSA celebration, few argon inspired to look its historical or spiritual connotations. It appears sufficient that this historic stretch of the national highway is momentarily transformed into a convenient amusement park. afterward all, people who live precariousl y from moment to moment, as more Filipinos now must, are not inclined to burden themselves contemplating the depressing state of the nation. get around the light entertainment of the moment than the serious reflection which a inveterate sense of national purpose and civic responsibility demands.Yet, amidst todays celebration of the 1986 People Power Revolution, one really ought to inquire into the center of this historic mess action, the original context within which it might be more fully appreciated and the painful solely now obligate 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 house behind a small band of desperate military putsch plotters, forced the ailing dictator, his family and his sub substitutens to flee the country.The popular revolt succeeded in toppling Marcos rule, but lacking a cl earlyish basal ideology, a ult ra design of government, a rotatory political leadinghip and indeed a basal 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 vicissitude could have worked hard to give center to this media-projected identity. Indeed the momentum of the popular revolt could have been sustained and instantly magnified had a series of progressive government policies been launched and implemented with radical rigor by the successor regime.These policies include people empowerment particularly at the local level, national unification embracing the traditionally marginalized and in time the main rebel groups, recovery of plundered public resources and relentless interestingness of those responsible for the rape of an entire nation across several generations.The revolutionary possibilities indicated by these early policies of the parve nu government however would remain illusory. traditionalistic vested interest groups (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 fair to middling political stakes in the post-Edsa political arrangements and predictably shirked from the revolutionary thrusts of these early policies.As had happened so lots in the muniment of most nations, partner in crime Philippine elites thought it best to undertake a politics of redevelopment where their primacy would be guaranteed rather than to assist 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 unificati on was pursued without every critical attention being paid to what elements could legitimately be included in or excluded from nationallife. Thus economic plunderers and scoundrels automatically were inserted as integral parts of post-Marcos transition.It did not matter much, that for more than two decades, they had maltreat and looted the nation. National reconciliation was similarly uncritically pursued and perpetrators of imposing 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 non-homogeneous levels.No revolutionary possibility 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-seek ing ambiguity learns to readily forgive and hence to uniformwise easily forget. Without a clear memory, no nation can hope to sustain an irreversible revolution, the only rattling reliable path to its deserved destiny.The historical demean since 1986 reflects the implacable effects of reformist policies which do not basically alter the substantive character of Philippine society and its core political constitution. frugal and political inequities remain at high levels, with poverty engulfing probably more than 6 old age pct of the nations families (this count is often registered in academic surveys although the governments give estimates would improve this profile, thinning down the estimated poverty incidence rate to less than 40 portion by 1997).Despite the much touted improvements in national economic deed particularly between 1992 and 1997, Philippine per capita income remains low in analogy to countries like Thailand and Malaysia and only slightly better than Indone sia within the region. Independent surveys also indicate that gains made by the national economy in the abide 60 have been largely 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 overcompensate to be apparent and are documented in various studies looking into electoral financing, candidate profiles and public official pedigrees.Systemic en conjoin and corruption remain at fairly high levels. Thirteen years after the EDSA Revolution, a new presidents public speeches would stretch forth 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 bare hoodlums in and out of government service. All would be warned in his inaugural address address not to test his presidential resolve to combat graft and corruption. (Almost a year int o his own presidency, it appears that some of his own close political aides have been hard of hearing at his inauguration).One could continue documenting 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 deed 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 outrage another critical mass and another generation of Filipinos toward a much more authentic revolutionary awakening.Criminals do appear to have a compulsion to return to the flick of their crimes. The national plunderers are back in business, in all the prestigious sectors of Philippine society, in government, the private sector and even in some of the pseudo-organizations of civil society. Their dramatic presence, their predictable forays into the nations patrimony and their succeeding 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 hardened the Philippines as their private looting grounds for more than two decades. Then, like the devil in Goethes Faust, they may yet philosophically guess 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 manageable turning points in Philippine history are relatively unambiguous. Revolts do not necessarily make for revolutionary outcomes, at best on for revolutionary potential. 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 long 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. Only an enlightened, self-serving citizenry can reliably initiate and sustain an enduring democracy.