Stoned

So, it turns out that nearly a third of those arrested at Mendiola were in fact far from sober. Tested for drugs by the Department of Health, 11 of the 38 taken into custody more than looked like addicts. They reeked of liquor and tested positive for shabu and marijuana.

Health Secretary Dayrit has served the government well by validating the first hypothesis that pops into mind whenever poor people pick up stones to hurl. Which is that maybe they are so stoned they could hurl. Health officials noted how the stone throwers who engaged the security forces in nearly 10 hours of bloody skirmishes were 'abnormally' agitated.

They had never seen anything like it, officials took turns gasping on television. Even as former street parliamentarians, some of them stressed, they could not begin to understand the mind that, when angered, will cause a person to tear up the streets. For that matter, they could not relate with this kind of anger. They were perplexed at how violence could be an option even to persons so destitute as to pin their hopes on a thieving movie star.

The pacifists and masters of the silent protest asked: how is this possible? Would people really risk their lives for any cause? Would the poor really do it for P500? Or is anything else emboldening them? Surely something -- natural or synthetic, but almost certainly chemical -- is behind such audacity. Surely this is not pure passion or anger.

The government wanted to know, and Dayrit tested some of the protesters' piss. Now they have enough positive results to assuage their biggest fears. It was drugs.

So much of it evidently flowed that people in power are using the fact to calm their own nerves. This is better than Valium to the paranoid. The conviction that nobody is really that mad at you, unless he's out of his own mind.

Drugs alter the mind. In this case, however, its influence is relevant not only to the temper of a mob -- especially considering that two out of three of those arrested and tested proved to be sober -- but to the capacity of other minds, the government's included, to be appreciative, or be in denial, of the power of raw emotion.

To be sure, that was a crazed crowd that pushed a government to the brink on Tuesday. But the government -- any government -- must realize that there is more to learn from that mob's resolve than its excesses. The people must appreciate that there is more to fear, there is more to learn, and there is thus more power, in taking that whole crowd for its avowed cause than in dismissing the actions of a fraction of it as drug-induced.

The purpose of those drug tests, clearly, is to rationalize a powerful display of anger such as this nation has rarely -- if ever -- seen. The government and perhaps the peace-loving Filipino people would appreciate the finding that it was all, on a certain level, artificial. Take away the money, the manipulative politicians and the drugs, and EDSA Tres wouldn't likely have been so violent, but could yet have been as peaceful and every bit as ineffective and superficial as EDSA Dos in effecting genuine political change.

Recognize what those tests were for, however, and you will realize what people in power truly fear. Not the capacity of drugs to induce people to violence, but the potentials of sober strength. The government does not want to prove the role that drugs played on Tuesday so as to understand what People Power 3 was all about. If anything, the testing detracts from the reality represented by the 1.5 to 2 million who peacefully massed for, by some accounts, no less than 22 demands for a better -- or different -- government. It merely seeks to discredit a mass movement that genuinely had a lot going for it until it was manipulated by powerful cowards on EDSA and ultimately represented by idiots at Mendiola.

Supposedly, as more objective and sober observers submit, People Power 3 is significant for the cathartic reintroduction of the poor as a force to be reckoned with in the elitist politics of this nation. We have long known their numbers. Now we have seen and smelled them. Powerful.

Tuesday's offered gift to the Philippine social movement, however, sharpens their presence with their demonstrated capacity -- and more important, willingness -- to take to the streets and tear it up if need be. Non-violence may be the hallmark of people power, but the poor now remind everybody that they won't just be sitting under the sun for too long anymore. In a sense, theirs is a call to arms against governments that have learned to take pacifists for granted. Theirs is a message that should ring clear. It does not take drugs to incite those same pacifists to pick up sticks and stones; just complacence that people no longer know how to be outraged.

More sectors will be quick to recognize this lesson. It will not just be the poor who will wield it. Committed though everyone remains to the virtues of active non-violence, they will keep looking back on Tuesday. While they joined in denouncing the violence, for example, unions will no doubt see that after the clashes, Labor Day is once again Labor Day. Everybody else will find their future rallies ringing louder, their messages carrying further. The government, after all, may have looked for and found drugs to explain the sticks and stones thrown in its direction, but it will never again underestimate the anger of those truly marginalized in this society, and at that only barely keeping their peace.

TODAY was a Philippine news daily broadsheet. It ceased publication in 2004.

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