Lessons

Did ‘EDSA 3’ represent a class war?

I got asked that questions several times over the past week or so. And my answer was always, yes and no.

No, it was not a class war in terms of its stated reasons or motivations. The one thing that sparked that explosion of protest, as articulated by the people there, was that Erap, who was one of the poor, had been humiliated, oppressed and abused. If he hadn’t been one of the poor, they would not have done that to him. They would have accorded him preferential treatment. Proof of that, they said, was that Cory and Ramos, who were bigger crooks but representatives of the rich, were being accorded preferential treatment.

Now, the notion that Erap was humiliated, oppressed and abused may be arguable -- many of those who thought Erap was guilty and should be jailed were themselves wrung by the sight of Erap being fingerprinted and photographed like a common thief -- but the notion that Erap is poor, or one of the poor, is not. He was never poor, is not poor and will never be poor. Unless you dump him in Muntinlupa along with the other real-life Asiong Salongas -- but his kin, which include a half-dozen full-fledged mistresses, will not be poor. If Erap was ever poor, it was only in being poor in character, poor in spirit and poor in taste.

But ‘EDSA 3’ was a class war in ways that went deeper than its expressions of undying devotion to a mythically poor Erap. It was a class war in that it drew its power from the very real class divide in society, a society rived into a few spectacularly rich and a teeming spectacularly poor. All the politicians before martial law, including a prospective president named Ninoy Aquino, used to call this the ‘social volcano’ and had the most vivid things to say about how the molten rock inside it had been pushed to its throat by centuries of neglect and was near to being spat. It did explode, in the revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, ignited in no small way by martial law.

That social volcano has been dormant over the last two decades, though it has rumbled like Mayon and threatened to rain fire off and on. For good reason: The divide has not gotten smaller, it has gotten bigger. The poor have not gotten more visible and more heard, they have gotten more invisible and more voiceless. They are the people we pass by each day, children sniffing rugby, arms and legs and bodies jumbled up in cardboard boxes, which they call home, like a Picasso painting, blotches in the rain tapping on the windows of our cars with bony fingers, people we pass by but do not see. These are the people who exist in the outer fringes of our consciousness, or memory, children who keen in the night while their stomachs rumble, toothless men and women selling cigarettes on sidewalks, who open their mouths to the roar of engines and the pealing of Church bells, the demented and depraved who should themselves hoarse from the rooftops of building before hurling themselves to the ground without parachutes, people who speak but whom we cannot hear. And there are more of them, except that we never recalled when they started growing.

Should we wonder why, when they have been stoked to fury by the sight of seemingly one of their own being oppressed, when they have found the opportunity to be seen and heard courtesy of false prophets, they would do what they did? It is the social volcano exploding, and producing as ruinous a result as Mayon in one of its more unpredictable fits.

What happened last Tuesday was a terrible tragedy. But what would be even more terribly tragic is to dismiss ‘EDSA 3’ as an aberration, an atavism, an out-and-out irrationality. What would be even more tragic is to go into ‘triumphalist’ mode, heaping scorn on the ‘bayaran’ that flocked to EDSA, and reducing them to the hooligans that rioted in Mendiola. Which we’re also seeing today. I have no problem about coming down hard on the irresponsible people who drove that mob to Mendiola. I myself would like to see them prosecuted and, where found guilty, jailed. Juan Ponce Enrile in particular has gotten away with murder (which may not be completely metaphorical) for so long, it’s time he got his just desserts. And I have no problem with drum-beating, or shouting to the world once again, the moral superiority of ‘EDSA 2’, which is right and justifiable.

But I do have a problem with chest-beating, with sugary songs about magkaisa, with pious exultation about the forces of good triumphing over the forces of evil. I do have a problem with reducing the two or three million people who massed at EDSA, excluding the busloads of people who were turned back by soldiers at checkpoints in the north, to ‘Erap loyalists’ who would wither away the way the Marcos loyalists withered away.

This more than a ‘loyalist’ phenomenon, it will not go away by being ignored.

We have to open our eyes to the size of that crowd, we have to open our ears to the cries of that crowd. At the very least because not all of what they were saying was mythical and emotional and superstitious. Some of what they were saying was perfectly rational. Chief of them, their call for past leaders who have been accused of corruption to be prosecuted as wellæCory Aquino and Fidel Ramos at the head of them. Why only Erap? The curious thing about ‘EDSA 3’, quite incidentally, was that it wasn’t just directed against President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, it was directed against Jaime Cardinal Sin, Cory and Ramos. That perception isn’t irrational either: It is based on the very real influence, if not control, of Sin, Cory and Ramos, over Ms Macapagal’s administration, which is what gives it an elitist sheen. Indeed, which raises the more fundamental, and very rational, question of whom EDSA 1 and EDSA 2 were fought for.

There is no doubt they were fought by the people: But whom were they fought for? For Cory? For Sin? For Ramos? For Miss Macapagal? For the rich?

But infinitely more than that, we must open our eyes and our ears to the throng that gathered at EDSA because of the non-mythical and ineluctable reality of their invisibility and muteness that, like volcanoes, produce catastrophic results when they blaze forth with fire and roar into visibility and audibleness. What happened in Mendiola last Tuesday was a terrible tragedy. But what would even be more terribly tragic is for the people who scorn myth and superstition to be imprisoned by their own myths and superstitions.

What would be even more terribly tragic is for the people who, in their eagerness to punish the enemies of EDSA 1 and EDSA 2, end up punishing the very people they fought EDSA 1 and EDSA 2 for. What would be even more terribly tragic is for the people who won a resounding victory to show they never deserved it.

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