Sukdulan

The culture of a people is best mirrored by its language. Among Tagalog-speaking Filipinos – a vanishing breed – the limits of anything is rendered by the word sukdulan, as when one says sukdulan ng tamis (the sweetest possible), sukdulan ng pait (the most bitter of all), sukdulan ng bait (the very limits of kindness), or sukdulang kasukaban (the worst possible treachery). Jacinto, Bonifacio and Marcelo H. Del Pilar – all Tagalogs – were familiar with the term and used it to describe the very limits of both good and evil, often the good that every human being deserves and the evil that all tyrannical regimes serve.

When a people reach the limits of anything – its threshold or kasukdulan – the thing invariably changes or is forced to change into something qualitatively different. In Philippine history, it might be argued that Filipinos revolting against Spanish tyranny reached a political threshold in the 1890s and were well on their way towards consolidating a sense of nationhood that American imperialism succeeded in aborting.

Since then, it is doubtful that Filipinos – nominally a nation – had gone through another political sukdulan. For this to have taken place, a strong sense of nationalism – one’s indelible identification with his/her "imagined community" – must inform and inflame enough people in this country. It is probable that none of the three EDSA People Power exercises qualifies as a political sukdulan event. EDSA One was too localized as a Metro Manila phenomenon and – its cries of Magkaisa! notwithstanding – never crystallized into being a truly nationally shared experience. It was also neither technologically nor politically a product of organizational maturity, which would have galvanized the entire nation not only to evict Marcos, but to dismantle the oligarchical regime which had brutalized Filipinos and which Marcos simply opportunistically improved as an accomplished political technocrat. Without a sustainable sense of kasukdulan, the sukdulan-oriented slogan of "Sobra na, tama na, palitan na!" proved meaningless as Marcos was overthrown but the oligarchy persisted and remained puissant.

Like its predecessor, EDSA Dos focused too much on a person and having ejected him from power, failed to sustain its much-trumpeted commitment for regime change. Barely a year after deposing a president and installing a successor, many of those who collaborated in the EDSA Dos enterprise are into mutual recriminations, self-destructive posturings and no-holds barred machinations. No real political threshold was crossed by the nation as a whole even as a rainbow coalition of assorted groups – many of them patently self-serving – claimed to speak for a nation whose legitimate interests were often ignored or brazenly violated.

EDSA Tres was not much of an improvement over its predecessors. High in emotional content and visibly violent, it nevertheless lacked constructive vision and soon revealed itself to be no more than a cathartic march to let off steam. Once dispersed, the marches could not regroup and probably feeling spent, could not be prevailed upon to prepare for yet another May Day assault. That the event scared the wits of many oligarchs and induced them to speak of their historic neglect of the poor and their undischarged obligations to the unwashed, the uneducated and the miserable is proof of how EDSA Tres was misconstrued to be another political threshold – a kasukdulan – being reached.

Not much good has issued from EDSA Tres since May 2001 and the country’s political and economic regime remains much the same as before all three EDSAs. Of course, Filipinos now have delicious images of panic-stricken oligarchs publicly reciting their mea culpa as they mistakenly believed that their appointed hour had come. Images of thresholds dissipate before enduring realities, however, and the same repentant oligarchs have now taken hold of themselves and are again preoccupied with their usual business of ruling.

But Filipinos – columnists included – are an ever hopeful people. Unable to mount a sukdulan challenge across a hundred years, their increasingly difficult times could be attended by more feckless governance and more irresponsible politicking by the oligarchy and its ruling elites – a mix that might just be the aggravation needed to drive a people towards defining their critical threshold and compelling them to cross it. This year – the year of the horse – might be recorded by posterity as the time when Filipinos, reaching their kasukdulan, finally decided to stop horsing around.