25/02/2026
๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ | ๐๐ฅ๐จ๐จ๐ ๐ข๐ง ๐ญ๐ก๐ ๐๐ญ๐ซ๐๐๐ญ๐ฌ, ๐๐ง๐ค ๐จ๐ง ๐๐ญ๐ญ๐๐ง๐๐๐ง๐๐ ๐๐ก๐๐๐ญ๐ฌ
Letโs be blunt with no sugar coating: tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of EDSA, and the country will treat it like a regular day. Unchanged alarms. Repeated uniforms. Ritualized timekeeping. As if February 1986 was just another chapter to underline and move past. As though February 1986 was merely a footnote to highlight and then dismiss.
EDSAโEpifanio de los Santos Avenue, a strip of asphalt turned into a battlefield. Where hope and terror rubbed elbows, and the country held its breath as the world might finally break. For four days, people poured onto it, millions of voices, arms linked, refusing to move, refusing to bow. They faced tanks. They faced guns. And in that standoff, a dictatorship that had ruled unchecked for twenty years began to unravel. Ordinary citizens, not soldiers, forced the grip of power to loosen. Democracy wasnโt handed back. It was wrested from those who thought it would never return.
And yet here we are.
Letโs be honest. The indifference stings.
Because the people who stood on that highway did not show up for a photo opportunity. They faced armored vehicles with nothing but rosaries, transistor radios, linked arms, and a kind of courage that most comfortable generations only theorize about. They knew what the regime was capable of. They had seen it. Some had already lost brothers, sisters, fathers. Still, they stood there anyway. Not because it was safe. Because it was necessary.
Under Martial Law, more than 3,000 were documented killed. Over 70,000 were tortured. At least 30,000 were detained without due process. These were not anonymous statistics drifting in a government archive. They were Filipino sons dragged from their homes. Filipino daughters brutalized in silence. Parents who waited at windows that would never again frame the face they were hoping to see. The scars belong to specific familiesโfamilies who still carry the weight of unfinished conversations and unmarked graves.
Now, contrast that with the present.
Classes will proceed. Blue ink marks the attendance. Teachers bark, โPage 143. Now.โ Students scribble dates theyโll forget before lunch. Offices hum under flickering lights, printers hacking out reports that vanish into the void. Routine swallows everythingโeven history. The nation will function efficiently. Smoothly. Quietly.
Too quietly.
Maybe itโs just unsettling to watch history flattened into routine. Reduced to a line item on a school calendar. A โspecial working holidayโ is observed only if an employer or a department head, or an institutional policy, decides it can spare the hours. Commemoration by permission. Memory, conditional.
A 2023 survey by Social Weather Stations reported that only 32% of Filipinos aged 18โ24 say they know the key events of EDSA. Thirty-two percent. That is not some harmless generational gap. That is erosion. A slow, grinding away of collective memory shaped by systems that reward output over reflection. Routine doesnโt just fill schedules. It dulls memory. It softens outrage. It trains people to move on before they have fully understood what happened.
Think about it.
History is not ink on paper. It is breath held in fear. It is the metallic smell of tanks idling under the sun. It is the static of a radio pressed close to the ear because that was the only way to know if democracy would survive the night. When that becomes a multiple-choice question, something vital is lost.
People like to talk about EDSA as if it were grand and orderly. It wasnโt. It was loud. Chaotic. Frightening. Comfort? Forget it. They werenโt here for ease. Just one more day under that rotten regime was too much. So, they stood. They disrupted. Risked everything. Messy. Loud. Terrifying. But the only way forward.
But society prefers predictability now. Efficiency. Continuity. The comfort of a filled planner. Call it progress if you want. It also looks a lot like moral laziness. Convenience over conviction. Productivity over principle.
Tomorrow, students will sit in plastic chairs. Workers will tap their IDs against scanners. A speech might be delivered carefully phrased, neatly timed, about democracy and unity. Applause. Then dismissal. Back to business.
And thatโs the problem.
A nation that never stops to feel the weight of its freedom will start to think itโs nothing. Fragile. Weightless. It fell from the sky instead of being ripped from the hands of a tyrant. And when liberty feels cheap, it becomes easy to trade.
That is the lie of routine: that everything is fine because everything is functioning. But history shows that societies can function while injustice thrives beneath the surface. They can run on time while silencing dissent. They can print reports while burying the truth.
As George Santayana warned, โThose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.โ
So perhaps what is required is not a grand ceremony, not another rehearsed declarationโbut a deliberate interruption. A refusal to let the day pass unexamined. A moment of discomfort. A moment of memory.
Pause. Sit with it. Say the words plainly.
Never again. Never forget.
Art by Cedrawer
