“I told you so” are four words that flutter so easily out of my mouth and anyone who knows me even a little is fully aware that I will take any opportunity to vocalize how I was in fact right.

https://www.facebook.com/sammumerp/posts/2479705862162757

On this day two years ago I started what is now an annual tradition for me, I wrote an essay on People’s Power Day.  Above is the link and in it I thought of an unsettling possibility.  I posited that if then presidential candidate Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. wins the election, then it is very likely that February 25th will no longer be the national holiday it’s been for twenty years now.  I was right.

730 days later, People’s Power Day was not granted national holiday status for the first time since 2002 and so today banks are open and people are clocking in at government offices.  There are sure to be rallies on the streets today, and it’s still Sunday so the banks and halls are only operating for half the day so I don’t know how much different today will actually look and feel. Given the context, the happenings of the day are sure to be colored by chants and marches of contemptuous rage on the avenues but sadly, most likely also, by incredulous sneers in the homes of many.  The country split into two with Facebook feeds and middling radio shows filling the air with “buti nga” and “dapat matagal na toh eh” while the sidewalks and campuses echo “Marcos Hitler Diktador Tuta.”  Had you gone back exactly 38 years to tell one of the thousands of protestors on that avenue that Bongbong Marcos is the president, they would go white and assume their march on EDSA would not lead to the ousting of the Marcoses.  I don’t know if I’d have the courage to tell them it did, the people just wanted them back.

We’re in the 1970s again, it seems.  America and Russia are enemies, Voltes V is airing on channel 7, Juan Ponce Enrile is in the cabinet, and the president is Ferdinand Marcos.  The mud the nation is stuck in feels thick and the shackles holding it down in the sludge far from rusting.  It’s happening right in front of our eyes and so flagrantly at that, not only a repeat but an erasure and revision of history.  To cause indelible harm and snuff out the tracks so you can do it again is an act of prideful malfeasance that I can only hope will include their first downfall in the repeat of events.  I see a family spend in excess and prices reach numbers exorbitant and dissidence labeled fraudulently and bodies pile up grotesquely but quietly. I hope I will see again in the streets of Flipinos rise up collectively.

Happy People’s Power Day everyone.