A pickup truck on EDSA

The iconic image of EDSA people power is of nuns stopping tanks. I remember seeing that in the flesh, but my dominant memory from those four days on EDSA is of a battered blue pickup truck that I borrowed from my landlady.

It was February 22, 1986 when I attended a mass near my boarding house in Loyola Heights. Right after the mass, the priest, the now deceased Father Pat Lim, gathered a few parishioners to discuss the growing tension in the country. Then he told us to listen to breaking news on the radio. Radio Veritas – then nearly everyone’s source of breaking news that was not fake – was reporting that rebel soldiers had broken away from the Marcos regime and holed up in Camp Aguinaldo. And they were fearing annihilation.

Back in the boarding house where I rented space along with a couple of other young high school teachers, Radio Veritas’ June Keithley was filling the hallways with the latest updates. Cardinal Sin was calling on people to gather at EDSA to protect the rebel soldiers. A group of activists was marching from Cubao in the middle of the night. A fellow teacher, Yeyey Alfonso, and I decided to go.

It was eerily quiet on EDSA, and people were just trickling to the thoroughfare, then still years away from the MRT that would loom over it. If there was ever a chance to attack the besieged soldiers and nip people power in the bud, that was it. I saw Jimmy Ongpin, the firebrand corporate executive and leading critic of Marcos, sitting on a curb with his teen-age son Apa. “Come back tomorrow and tell your friends to come,” he said with a calm authority.

Back in the boarding house, I made a flurry of calls to my parents in the United States who were frightened for my safety, and to fellow teachers who wanted to meet up on EDSA. The next morning, we learned that the crowd on EDSA was turning huge, and there was a call for drinking water and food. That was when Yeyey and I decided to borrow our landlady’s old blue pickup truck parked in the boarding house driveway. Our landlady Len did not hesitate to lend us the truck despite the risks; she was sympathetic to the cause along with nearly everyone else we knew.

We found drums, filled them with drinking water, and we were on our way (plastic bottles of water were not yet ubiquitous; tap water was still drinkable). We spent the next three days inching our way through the peaceful, spirited EDSA hordes, giving out drinking water to people who had not gone home, ordinary folks sharing cups and the latest news, some of which were early rumors that the Marcoses had already fled. People gave us cartons of hard-boiled eggs to distribute as well.

In those four days, EDSA was mostly a mammoth pedestrian lane where motor vehicles could not pass. Our blue pickup truck was one of the privileged few that the crowd would part for (otherwise, they could not get refills of their water containers). But it wasn’t just EDSA that we traversed but the side streets around Camp Aguinaldo where the crowds were thinner and more vulnerable to the loyalist tanks and Marines who were exploring weak points around the military camp.

The people on these side streets tended to be more hard-core because of the greater danger, some of them sutana-wearing seminarians and priests locking arms. They built improvised barricades. At one point, near the entrance to White Plains, as Yeyey and I were giving out water, a rumor had rippled through the crowd that tanks and soldiers were approaching. A priest told us to place our pickup truck in the barricade! My nervous plea that the truck was not ours fell on deaf ears. I recall an armored column approaching later and then turning back after seeing the people with locked arms behind the barricade that featured a certain blue pickup truck. Someone took a photo of the truck at that moment, which was eventually shown to my landlady, who gasped before letting out a big laugh.

The beauty of people power was the participation of so many in a multitude of little things that mattered: not just swarming EDSA, but lending a pickup truck without hesitation, homes in Greenhills allowing us to refill water drums, the hard-boiled eggs, the seminarians who blocked even the side streets on the periphery of EDSA.

Yes, the periphery: the dominant EDSA narrative is about the main action on that highway and the players who made the headlines; yet for that peaceful political change to happen, the resistance had to permeate the periphery, and it had to precede 1986 in streets and hills all over the country. I’ve heard countless people living outside Manila at the time remind me that they too contributed to people power in places like Baguio, Davao, and even America. What electrified the world were televised images of determined common Filipinos who seemed willing to die in an act of civil disobedience. A friend living in Boston mailed me a bulging envelope full of US newspaper clippings about those four days. Travelling overseas in those post-February days in 1986, Filipinos were congratulated in airports upon presentation of their passports.

What ensued in the years that followed is up to the historians and the rest of us to ponder and debate. But what is clear at least in my mind is what took place in those four days: a creative, non-violent action among Filipinos that had not been seen before in our lifetimes, and a rare victory in our history. People united against a dictator, and won.

There was a time when nearly everyone I knew was on EDSA on those magnificent days in February, and shared an unspoken sacred bond. Today, three decades years later, most people around me were not there or not even born yet. Since recent history is so poorly taught in our schools, it has become easy for some to deny the glory of those years or even belittle what their fellow Filipinos achieved.

History buffs like to compare eras and generations. As great as Rizal and Bonifacio’s generation was, they did not win freedom for the country, falling under the wing of US colonizers after a brutal war. Neither did the gallant generation of Filipinos who fought against the Japanese in Bataan.

This is a biased opinion, but I want to throw it out there anyway, 32 years after victory: A case can be made that those in the resistance against martial law that culminated at EDSA comprise the nation’s greatest generation. —GMA News