Feature: Memories of Ninoy

Social Studies lessons in grade school were marked by the acronyms

AVSECOM (for Aviation Security Command), ATOM (for August Twenty One Movement), and JAJA (for Justice for Aquino, Justice for All) which progressed to the marriage of Doy Laurel’s UNIDO (United Nationalist Democratic Organization) and Cory Aquino’s LABAN (Laban ng Bayan) in high school.

For a time, classroom discussions centered on that man who flew home via a China Airlines jet from Taipei by the name of Marcial Bonifacio (Marcial for Martial Law, Bonifacio to represent his imprisonment in Fort Bonifacio).

It appeared as though his escorts – militarymen at that – had ushered him to his grave with ex-convict Rolando Galman, entering the picture, as the assassin. Reports later that day of August 21 (exactly 25 years ago today) identified him as Sen. Benigno “Ninoy” S. Aquino, Jr. who had come home – leaving behind a family and a good life in Boston, Massachusetts – passionate about public service because the “Filipino is worth dying for.”

Ninoy’s funeral march from the Sto. Domingo Church in Quezon City to the Manila Memorial Park in Parañaque was attended by around two million people – said to be the longest funeral march in world history.

After that, the nation was in unrest. A series of nationwide protests, noise barrage, yellow-confetti rallies, call for civil disobedience was mounted against two decades of Marcos dictatorship. 

At 14 years old, I found myself enraged by a news item on the government’s rejection of the findings presented by jurist Corazon Agrava of the Agrava Fact-Finding Board that indeed there was military conspiracy in the Aquino slay.

There was outburst for the rigging of the snap election returns called for by Marcos, as claimed by the 30 computer personnel who walked out of polling headquarters.

Ninoy’s patriotic fervor is so contagious – only the heart pierced by the arrow of nationalism could best understand what was happening to the country then. So together with my mother and quite a number of Yellow Ladies, we sought justice on the streets donning yellow shirts matched with yellow leis, brushing aside threats that Cory supporters who will take their sentiments to the streets will die in cold blood.

That time, we believe in justice only the street can provide; that the street should serve as courtroom and the people become instant jurors. Salus populi est suprema lex.

We flaunted our “Sobra Na! Tama Na! Palitan Na!” placards, shouted to the top of our lungs “Ibagsak ang Diktadorya!”, waved our “Ninoy, ‘di ka nag-iisa!” streamers, and sang the anthem “Bayan Ko”.

Twenty five years after, this country is still in a mess. Those in their mid-20s have not seen that turning point in Philippine political history, but even those who had witnessed failed to live up to Ninoy’s ideals.

In this stage of the Arroyo administration where corruption is no longer sugarcoated with masked escorts, but flagrantly done in front of the Filipino people by top government officials, it would be hard to find a man who can stand up knowing fully well he would be shot dead.

Noisy, chatty people inflicted by Messianic complex are standing up against the government in their so-called anti-graft crusades. And these fake heroes just bungle everything up now that corruption and repression is worse than Ninoy’s time.

We need self-denying men who would share in Ninoy’s passion for public service; men who can move this country to the path of regeneration, not oblivion; statesmen who would move our children to respect the lessons of history, not spit and stomp at them.  

I may no longer look at events with innocence as when I was just a teenager. Precisely why the screaming, dissenting and resenting can be justified where regeneration will make it necessary.