Where is people power?

BIMBO CABIDOG

The palace says people power won’t work against Duterte. The statement is of course fallacious. People power will always work against anybody in power. The question is: will it yet happen?

People Power II cut short the term of President Joseph Estrada. The country may now be worse off than during Erap’s time. But the massive numbers of citizens that overthrew him are off the streets. 

The atrocities during Ferdinand Marcos’ fourteen years of dictatorship seem like juvenile delinquency compared to the terror, disregard of the rule of law, murderous impunity, trampling of democratic institutions and pure wickedness that grip the country today. But where are the demonstrating millions that figured in Edsa 1 and 2? What happened to people power? 

One thing is sure: the people have not gone anywhere. They are in the country, dispersed all over the length and breadth of the archipelago. And they continue to make history if of a different kind – a history of not taking collective action even as the situation worsens.

But the power to debunk the order of the day is inert. The dynamo of radical political change that has seen bad rulers in the past fell before civilian upheavals could not be harnessed, not now anyway. It sleeps in the hands of the citizenry. 

People power lies cold, although not dead. The youthful warriors who went into the chill of the night to fight with nothing but each one’s firm conviction are no more than ghosts of the past to haunt the paranoid powers-that-be. No inducement at present could whip their numbers back again. 

The concerned citizens who flocked in their hundreds of thousands into a defenseless twelve-lane highway squeezed between two major military camps, to shield mutineers from the wrath of a dictator, wouldn’t budge an inch anymore to defy another more atrocious fascist dictatorship. 

Is there no longer hope in the so-called people power yet rising? Have the citizens grown tired of it, or realized it as a big mistake? The answers to all are No!

The dynamo of social-political change is still very much available for history making. It just isn’t turning now, or it can’t be turned yet. The energy is at rest.

The tectonic political movements of Edsa 1 and 2 that toppled two rules in the country not by election but by citizens’ uprising are still being seen by majority of Filipinos as events of epic proportion elevating the country in the eyes of the world. They represent the race’s noble and heroic character.

They were certainly not a regretful blunder, but moments of glory and pride throughout the country’s long history of fighting oppression. So why are the people not going for it now in the face of unbridled tyranny? Why are there no rising in the streets?

Disabuse your mind of the thought that the Edsa experiences in 1986 and 2001 were revolutions. They were not. The people who massed up in what would evolve into full blown uprisings were not plotting to change the social or political order. They were merely responding to a call vested with life and death urgency. Their action, knowingly or unknowingly, was tactical. It was for the short-term purpose of confronting an issue.

Yes, the affairs did not fall along a strategic course, consciously charted by ideological beacons over a long period of time, to fundamentally transform society. They were a spontaneous and instant response to a situation. They passed no hatching or weeks of deliberation. They just struck on impulse.

One common thing about their implosions was their being unplanned. No conscious political force engineered, much more organized, them. They just sprang like mushroom blooms on a clear day. They sprang from a ripened revolutionary moment, unscheduled and spot on.

It is the moment of profound crisis that political thinkers talk of: the resistance or repugnance of the ruled to rule in the old way, and the failure of rule to rule in the same old way. The political dynamo that turns change is the spontaneous and instantaneous action of the people to confront a situation.

Without the presence of the said crisis, expect no people power. This is because it cannot simply be commanded, induced or enticed to rise. It has a mind of its own. It heeds a different voice than agitators or partisan leaderships would presume. In fact, it can distrust them or being led by them.

The usual banners, colors and oft-rehashed slogans may pose a sectarian barrier to it. They can discourage more than encourage people power. The people in their millions affiliate only with the genuine expression of what they think or feel, not what self-claimed revolutionary vanguards want them to think or feel.

Sometimes, interested political entities in the eagerness to rally the people under their calls actually alienate them. Why doesn’t people power spring to action now? A reason may be the alienation and distrust of the people re those calling for it.

Two determining factors have been shown to bring about people power. One is the objective condition prevailing at the given moment. This is the existence of a profound crisis of rule that makes the order no longer tenable, acceptable or livable to the ruled. It needs only a triggering incident to explode, like the foiled mutiny of a bunch of the Armed Forces' junior officers accompanied by the call of Cardinal Sin to shield them with civilian warm bodies in the glaringly dying moments of the Marcos dictatorship .

The other is the subjective state of the masses. This is the awareness and sense of profound injustice that they think as well as feel impossible to live with anymore. Such a consciousness, coupled by the conviction that action to resist the prevailing regime is right as it champions no other agenda than theirs, makes the political setup volatile.

Kindling the latter is no simple matter. In the present situation it is being doused by the people's historical experience themselves of the post-Edsa period. Edsa 1 may be credited with democratic restoration, but it did not make the majority truly rule. Alas, the people have begun to see that.

The era brought about by the removal of Marcos merely restored the power and wealth of the elite cliques that lost them to his dictatorship. The Lopezes for one regained Meralco including the electric coops that sprouted during the time the government has already taken over the utility.

The comeback of the pre-martial law order during the post-martial law period ushered the reign of political dynasties and the same old politicians using money to buy elections and thereby gain bureaucratic entitlement to the division of economic spoils compounded by the raiding of the public coffers.

The launching of people power in the long run did not put power in the people. The succeeding post-Marcos dispensation left them powerless. it excluded them from rule. It rendered them helpless against corruption and greed by the elite that frustrated their aspirations of a better life.

Conditions would worsen that it again necessitated one more political upheaval of citizens massing at Edsa to remove another despicable rule. People power II succeeded in changing regime not by the constitutional route of elections, but by the forceful removal of a sitting president through massive and paralyzing demonstrations. But again the aftermath of the saga left the people holding an empty bag. They were still powerless, excluded from rule by the elite, and condemned to suffer far worse conditions.

Social enlightenment could have hedged the people against victimization by politicians especially in elections that always turn out to be self-defeating exercises for them. But no one and nothing helped them. Even the left which has arrogated the task of educating the masses would dismally fail in raising their consciousness.

Such were the post-Edsa realities that now make them wary against being used again in people power sagas by political interests extraneous to theirs. Given the subjective state, forged by painful lessons from the past, no call for people power may yet hope to be heeded until the conditions have become ripe for themselves to call for it.