It was all wrong from the very beginning and the wronging went on up to the present. The blunder of Mr. Marcos and his cohorts in acceding to call a snap election for a fresh mandate, relying so much on his magic that kept him in power for two decades. He miscalculated everything, from the use of guns, goons and gold (his famous 3Gs) in the elections, to massive cheating in the counting of votes that culminated in the walkout of computer tabulators who could no longer bear the systematized cheating, to the call for civil disobedience, up to the peaceful convergence of the multitude that staged the bloodless People Power Revolution of 1986. The wrongs of the conjugal dictatorship were terminated by a people that rose in peaceful struggle against the abuses of the dictator.
The struggle against the abuses of the dictatorship is not the People Power Revolution that happened at EDSA. It was a long battle fought by the nameless men and women who resisted the dictatorship all throughout the dark years of martial law. Thousands of these courageous Filipinos were maimed for life and the less fortunate ones were sent to the deep abyss of no return. Those who disappeared during the dark years had never attained justice in their struggle for change and in the pages of history as well. Those who survived are still fighting for justice both in the proper place in history and in obtaining the compensation that the courts awarded for their sufferings under martial law.
Even the penultimate battle that led to the fall of the dictator and the catapulting of Cory Aquino to the presidency was not an overnight event at EDSA but a long battle that took place across the nation. The first People Power Revolution in 1986 was a demonstration of the Filipino courage to change an abusive dictatorial regime by peaceful bloodless means. It caught world attention and became a model for other peoples in various countries that wanted change and democracy by way of peaceful means.
This world-renowned event placed our country in the global political map for its being a bloodless revolution. But that fame would soon get lost along memory lane among our people and before the world. That event ended two decades of dictatorship. It is unfortunate that two decades after, a new dictator emerged, abusing power to protect a doubtful mandate that was won not much by the vote but by the cellphone. That doubtful mandate came after the ouster of a popular actor who became president after the stint of a police general who defected from the conjugal dictator but hid in fear in a police camp that was eventually protected by the throng of peace-loving people that converged at EDSA who fought the conjugal dictator.
It is grossly wrong to be calling the People Power Revolution as EDSA. The latter is merely a highway where the final blow to topple the dictator was staged. Better still to accord the historical event as People Power Revolution because calling it EDSA conveniently delimits the struggle to that event that happened in that famous highway and effectively excludes the supreme sacrifices and struggles of all the unnamed and faceless heroes across this Filipino nation.
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