THE 37th anniversary of the February 25, 1986 EDSA Revolution was virtually ignored by everybody, save for a few who stayed for a minute or two at two monuments along EDSA in Quezon City.
One is at the church beside Robinson’s Galleria along Ortigas Avenue, and the other is at the People Power structure near Camp Aguinaldo.
To accommodate anyone who wished to mark the anniversary at the said sites, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. even declared February 24 a holiday, considering that February 25 was a Saturday.
Incidentally, that measure spoke much about the magnanimity of President Marcos Jr., considering the EDSA Revolt marked the end of his father’s incumbency as President of the Philippines.
Despite the holiday, the fact that remains is the anniversary was a non-event.
Even the dilawans and pinklawans associated with the Aquino family and the very unpopular Liberal Party were hardly seen at either of the sites.
Probably, the pinklawans are still struggling with their embarrassing defeat in the May 2022 presidential and vice presidential elections, the polls that installed President Marcos Jr. and Vice President Sara Duterte in office by an unprecedented, overwhelming majority, unheard of for the past 36 years.
Conspicuously absent at the sites were the likes of Liberal Party diehards Mar Roxas and Bam Aquino.
Ex-Senator Antonio Trillanes IV and ex-Supreme Court Chief Justice Hilario Davide Jr., known minions of the Aquino family, weren’t there, either.
A cable television channel known for featuring selected documentaries praising the EDSA event and Mrs. Aquino every February and August yearly, has also ceased with the practice for almost five years now.
Even the newspapers do not bother featuring anything newsworthy about EDSA 1986 anymore.
I only noticed one newspaper columnist in another newspaper devote column space to Aquino on the occasion of the EDSA event. That’s understandable because the columnist got a juicy post in the Aquino administration.
I guess it’s just a case of paying a debt of gratitude, considering the columnist never got another high government post after the stint with Mrs. Aquino.
To the majority of young Filipinos today, EDSA 1986 is a thing of the forgettable past.
As for the elders, EDSA 1986 only marked that awful moment in Philippine history when Corazon Aquino seized power through a military mutiny, and thereafter ruled first, as an absolute ruler (through her exercise of both executive and legislative power); then as a vindictive political leader (she encouraged the demonizing of the Marcos family); then as an unaccepted commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (she had to face frequent coup attempts); then as a foe of press freedom (as President, she filed libel raps against journalists Maximo Soliven and Louie Beltran); then as a protector of her family’s vested interests (she got her family’s Hacienda Luisita exempted from the coverage of her own agrarian reform program); and then as an incompetent President (she made the Philippines the brownout capital of the world).
In short, whatever historical significance EDSA 1986 had at the beginning steadily deteriorated during the rest of the Cory regime.
Why Benjamin Diokno, the extremely overpaid ex-Governor of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, even allowed Mrs. Aquino to join her late husband Ninoy on the P500 money bill is a mystery to me.
Adding to the growing insignificance of the EDSA revolt is the lackluster administration of Mrs. Aquino’s son, President Noynoy Aquino.
Noynoy Aquino was just as vindictive as his mother, as seen in the way he publicly insulted then Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona, whom he saw as the reason why the Aquino family’s Hacienda Luisita may have to be ultimately covered by the agrarian reform law.
Many observers believe Noynoy Aquino took personal interest in seeing to the impeachment and ouster from office of Corona in 2012.
It was also during the Noynoy Aquino presidency when China was able to slowly but surely build its naval bases in the West Philippine Sea, in areas which, under International Law, fall within the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines.
Public disenchantment with EDSA 1986 and the Aquinos became obvious in the May 2019 elections.
There, the electorate refused to re-elect Senator Bam Aquino (Cory’s nephew and Noynoy’s first cousin), and instead voted Imee Marcos as senator.
Mar Roxas, the Liberal Party prime bet for senator in 2019, was also clobbered at the polls. Roxas was Noynoy Aquino’s publicly acknowledged personal choice to succeed him in the presidency.
The final nail on the coffin came in 2022 when the pinklawan, and therefore pro-Aquino, pro-Liberal Party) tandem of Leni Robredo and Francis Pangilinan were ignominiously defeated in their bid to become president and vice president, respectively.
Obviously, the anniversary of the 1986 EDSA mutiny was ignored this year because nobody likes to remember bad times.