Reunion

WHERE was I on Feb. 25 31 years ago?

Like any member of the genus Neotoma, I pride myself in being a passionate collector. The genuine packrats in the animal world, woodrats stockpile debris in their nests.

Over the years, I’ve kept many of my notebooks. These are the old-fashioned ones: paper bound by thread, spring or glue. I took notes, planned lectures, reflected, and doodled.

The notebooks are not valuable. First, I can barely read my penmanship. Most importantly, I cannot remember where I kept the hoard. What use is a record that cannot be found?

Yet, yesterday’s 31st anniversary of the Edsa People Power Revolution reminded me why I would rather not part with a notebook.

In my attitude towards writing, reading and recollecting, I perhaps share more affinity with war survivors than rodents.

Persons who endured extreme deprivation in World War II cannot seem to let go of their possessions.

What’s worthless for others may be insurance against hardship. Or is writing just memories made tangible and easier to retrieve?

By stirring up people to express different perspectives about an event in 1986, President Duterte has made People Power timely and relevant again, a brilliant stroke in resuscitating Filipinos’ dependably undependable sense of history.

The Malacañang pronouncement that Filipinos should not dwell in the past and the President’s decision to skip the low-key ceremony did not prevent people from engaging like no past spectacle at the Edsa Shrine has orchestrated.

Yesterday, I watched TV coverage of a small group of black-shirted protesters move in after another group moved away from the Edsa Shrine. Against tradition, the administration held the Edsa rite at the military headquarters in Quezon City.

People choose their memories. Most of the faces holding up the black banner of protest were born after the Philippine Revolution of 1986.

A day before the 31st Edsa Revolution anniversary, I participated in a Cebu seminar training the media and members of civil society on monitoring the judiciary. The seminar kit came in a black envelope.

A former student, now a lawyer with a civil society organization, stood out in her black T-shirt with words bringing back an era in what the great historian Renato Constantino called as our continuing past.

On Feb. 25, 2017, I started to hunt for 31-year-old notebooks.

There is an online game called “a reunion of friends”. One is asked to describe a first meeting with one word. In the intersecting circles of friends, there is an infinite variety of words to describe first meetings.

For Feb. 25, 1986, my word is “community”. What’s yours?


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s February 26, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Happy ending

EBULLIENCE doesn’t come to mind when I think of Filipino voters.

The word comes from the Latin word “ebullientem,” which means “spilling over”. A website has even a stronger translation: “boiling over”.

The closest to capturing the spirit of being “very happy and excited” is the small yellow-throated bird that flits among the budding branches of the “tambis” tree growing outside our bedroom window.

As it moves among the fruits and the flowers—many of which are even bigger than itself—the bird is the very picture of ecstasy. Its color is a radiant flash among the ivory-hued blossoms. Unlike the big black bees hovering like uninspired drones above the blooms, the bird chirps and chirps away, even in the presence of the cats, sleeping nearby with a twitching tail.

With May 9 drawing close, I wish I had an eighth of the optimism in the tiny feathered body.

Elections come with a predictability that leave many Filipinos prematurely cynical and pessimistic. I was born in 1965, when Ferdinand Marcos began his first term as the 10th president of the country.

Fifty-one years later, as the nation is deluged by surveys that predict who may win the race to become the country’s 16th president, I wonder how to summon the energy to draw up a mental list of candidates I will cast my ballot for. Unlike the bird in our tambis, the choices facing voters are thin.

The most prescient assessment of this horse race does not come from journalists and scholars. It comes from the social media influencers who upload the creative, entertaining, irreverent memes parodying every political pretender, antic or gambit.

Policy and issues were the focus of the organizers, as well as the five presidential candidates, of the first presidential debate held in Cagayan de Oro City last Feb. 21.

Yet, gauging from the comments and memes proliferating on the Net, the Mindanao leg of the “PiliPinas Debates 2016” might as well have been every soap opera, romantic comedy or Star Wars installment captivating watchers with a fixation for personalities, drama and entertainment.

What cerebral discourse can hold up to the “kilig” power of DuRiam (seconds after they clinched before the debate, the embrace of Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago and Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte went “sticky” online and inspired unforgettable memes)?

Granted: Filipino humor can soften any blow the fates will deal us. Will we still be laughing when the electoral results will trickle in after May 9?

Last Feb. 25, the 30th anniversary of the EDSA People Power Revolution, Martial Law survivors launched a campaign to oppose the vice-presidential candidacy of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. Aside from opposing the distortion of history, the anti-Marcos activists urge millennials to remember the lessons of EDSA.

Passing the half-century mark, I recall EDSA as a mixed success. Look what we brought in after the People Power Revolution: an Estrada and an Arroyo. Or, if you belong to the opposing camp, two Aquinos.

On the other hand, Feb. 25, 1986 demarcated the past, when elections meant killing fields, and the present, when a campaign tragedy is a meme that bombs. Thirty years should make us realize where hope lies: in an informed citizenry casting their votes only for those who love the country.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in the February 28, 2016 issue of the Sun.Star Cebu Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”