Another voice

Today we bring Jaime Cardinal Sin to his final place of rest. Over the past week of mourning, the most frequently asked question has been: Will there be another like him?

Most of us came of age and matured during a time of moral and political uncertainty. This was a time of almost continuous turbulence. This was a time of dramatic changes and, as well, a time when the most disturbing issues seem to cling tenaciously to our lives even as we went about changing governments and expelling leaders.

Through this long episode of turbulence, generations changed. The nation rose and faltered and rose again – and perhaps faltered once more.

When our nation’s capacity for hope was at its lowest and it seemed we had no leaders to trust, we turned to Cardinal Sin to tell us what to do so that we may all hope again. We forced him into roles men of the cloth do not normally play in times of normalcy. We clung to him; and he responded although at times reluctantly.

We played the fates, toyed with the odds, assured that when the chips are down and confusion has swept all of us, Cardinal Sin will be there to bring us clarity. He will be there to direct us to a rallying point.

When he called for us, we came. We dropped the usual routines to do his bidding. We rose courageously against a tyrant and a failed president. We set aside our differences and acted in concert. We brought out our banners and our rosaries, stood against tanks with, literally, nothing more than prayer.

Maybe it was not for Cardinal Sin himself that we did that. We were simply flustered and fragmented, wanting for a voice we could all trust. A voice that would cut through all our disagreements and unite us.

How could one forget that fateful February night in 1986?

After the elections were stolen and a large wave of protests, things have come to an impasse. The dictatorship dug in; the democrats prepared for a long siege. We were ready to raze our own economy to the ground. If the tyrant would not yield to the people’s clamor, we would see to it that he could not govern.

Or, if he pretended to govern, it would only be over the ruins of a polarized society. Over the carcass of a nation with a shell of a government.

When news of a military mutiny spread through frantic phone calls and couriers, our first impulse was to prepare for a civil war. Let the military institution destroy itself through factional war. Then we will march.

Like many of my politicized colleagues active in the struggle against the dictatorship, I had stored enough food in my home, buying whatever we could afford from emptied store shelves. We had gasoline stored in bottles, a network of sanctuaries in place and an alternative channel for communications prepared.

Then we heard Cardinal Sin over Radio Veritas, calling on the faithful to gather around the camps to protect "our friends." That was a call that ran against every scenario we prepared for, every plan we had drawn up. That was a call that ran against our political intuition: protecting the same men who had thrown us in jail.

But we went anyway. I left a child and a pregnant wife at home and drove my trusty, rickety Beetle to the frontlines with whatever crude means for street fighting we has mustered. In my mind, decent insurrections were fought with flaming barricades and Molotov cocktails.

At the junction of Edsa and Ortigas, we proceeded to intercept buses, positioned them in such a way that they could stop tanks and slashed their tires. There was a suggestion to booby trap the buses and so we went off to buy condiments for crude explosives. In the meantime, we gathered Molotov bombs in the eventuality the tanks materialized before we could booby trap the buses. This was where we were going to die fighting.

But while we were busy with our rather conventional preparations for an insurrection, a prayerful crowd moved past our intricate weave of buses and bombs. That crowd protected our barricade with their bodies. At that moment, our primitive idea about how a decent insurrection ought to be waged died. We gave up on the idea of booby traps, sheepishly put away our clumsy bottles of petrol and watched with amazement as young girls walked forward to offer flowers to the Marines.

Through the night, we practiced the uninitiated crowd in dealing with tear gas. We asked them to keep their handkerchiefs wet and drilled them in organized withdrawal. When pro-Marcos troops did fire a few tear gas canisters along Santolan Road, the wind carried the cruel cloud into their faces.

The Marines sat on their tanks, baffled. The crowd control units sent in were intimidated by the crowd they were supposed to disperse. We, who had set our minds to street fighting, were even more amazed: a large prayerful mass was determined no violence would break out. They sang songs, prayed the Rosary and passed food around.

The Revolution had become a picnic.

Was this how that chuckling Cardinal imagined things would turn out?

Perhaps, when he called the people out to the streets around the camps, he was confident his was the only voice that would guide the course of events, dictate the mood of the moment, determine the demeanor of rising. It was a confidence that drew, not from arrogance but from a recognition that there was no other voice, no other leader that the masses would trust save his.

That was a preeminence dictated by the sheer absence of any other contender to his voice during a time of absolute confusion where the only voice that mattered was the one that drew its strength from our collective morality.

Will there be another voice like this one when another dreadful moment – a moment when all our civil institutions break down – materializes?

There might be, when the times dictate it. But let us not bet on it.

Instead, let us deal with the course of things so that we do not have to put our institutions to severest test. Let us ensure that civic leadership is always available so that we might not have to rely on miracles to save ourselves from ourselves.

There might not be another voice like Sin’s the next time around.