We come together to remember EDSA. Even after 40 years, the memories remain fresh and vivid for us who lived through those wondrous days. I remember our courage before the tanks on Ortigas (real tanks, not Armored Personnel Vehicles). Young women went up to the serious, unsmiling soldiers and placed flowers down the muzzle of their rifles. As the tanks started to roll, we formed a phalanx and held our breaths, fearful that they might turn right to attack Camp Aguinaldo. When they turned left to return to Fort Bonifacio, we let out a cheer. I saw a turret open and a hand come out in a “Laban” sign. It was a heady experience. We sang “Magkaisa” and “Handog ng Pilipino sa Mundo.” We brought food and shared. We welcomed surrendering soldiers to Ati-atihan beats and accompanied them kapit-bisig.
In the years when we saw no light at the end of the tunnel of martial law, I used to pray the psalm “Lord, we heard from our fathers what deeds you performed in their days… But now you no longer march with us.” So at EDSA I thanked God for marching with us once more.
In a column I wrote on the 3rd anniversary of EDSA in 1989, I reflected on EDSA as a Transfiguration Experience. In our euphoria we sang Magkaisa: “Panahon na ng pagkakaisa. Kahit ito ay hirap at dusa, Magkaisa at magsama. Kapit kamay sa bagong Pagasa.” We were transfigured. We were our better selves.
But in the Gospel of the Transfiguration, while Peter, James and John would have wished to stay on the mountain with Jesus, Moses, and Elijah, they had to go down the mountain, and there they encountered a boy possessed and epileptic and they could not cure him. Each year we celebrate EDSA and we too come down each year from the EDSA heights, and see the many epilepsies of our country: hunger, illiteracy, sickness, corruption, indifference. And like the apostles, we feel helpless before them.
EDSA was a gift and a grace. Through the courageous leadership of President Cory and Cardinal Sin and many others, we won back our democratic freedoms after 14 years of martial law. But this gift of democratic freedoms has left us with the task and mission of getting to know and work with our democratic institutions so that they serve our people, especially our children and our poor.
But unfortunately, as Jesus says in the Gospel, “The children of darkness are in their generation wiser than the children of light.” The children of darkness have learned to use our democratic institutions for their own selfish ends, better than we have learned to make them work for our people in need.
30 years ago, in the mid-1990s, I went down from the hill together with ACED (Ateneo Center for Educational Development) to meet with teachers and pupils in four very large and very poor public elementary schools in Payatas. I asked, “Bakit hindi pumapasok ang mga bata? Bakit hindi mabuti ang kanilang pag-aaral?” Teachers answered, “Father, gutom sila.” I learned about pervasive hunger and malnutrition. I also learned about the many non-readers we bewail today.
We started working to find solutions. Ten years later, Dr Bopeep Saloma, our incoming Vice-President for Higher Education, studied our efforts to help us understand “What works” in helping solve the problems of our children and our poor. Her study concluded: “Change in Philippine society should be the outcome of two lines of engagement: making existing institutions fulfill their functions and enabling different actors and groups to interact with each other in new ways. Connectedness between institutions and their publics and connectedness between those who have more and those who have less in life underpin the type of social change being pursued by Ateneo actors.”
We see this in the feeding program to address child hunger and malnutrition, which ACED has led since 2009. Dr Mel Oracion and ACED pioneered the “Central Kitchen model” to provide lunch for 4,000 pupils, 1,000 each in 4 public elementary schools along Commonwealth Avenue. In 2010 Mayor Sherwin Gatchalian of Valenzuela saw it and said, “I have always wanted to provide food for the malnourished children of my city, but I did not know how.” Under the leadership of Mayor Sherwin and then Mayors Rex and Wes, Valenzuela partnered with ACED to provide a large feeding program and became a model for other LGUs. More importantly, this initiative became a proof of concept that led to the 2018 law mandating feeding programs for all day-care pupils and malnourished elementary school pupils. At a recent meeting, Senators Bam Aquino and Sherwin Gatchalian announced that this year the budget for this program has doubled from 10 to 20 billion pesos. The partnership between Ateneo and Valenzuela continues today after 15 years, and at a recent education summit, Valenzuela officials were happy to tell me how happy they are with our partnership.
More recently, a reading program for non-readers, also developed by ACED, is scaling up in a program called “Tara Basa” in partnership with DepEd and DSWD, through Secretaries Sonny Angara and Rex Gatchalian.
So, it is possible for us to help make our democratic institutions work to serve our children. But it is not easy. We have to leave our comfort zones and go down from the hill and encounter our people and their many problems. We have to learn to work together with unfamiliar people and institutions. We have to persist and persevere.
What will give us the will and persistence to go through all that trouble? Friends ask me what keeps me going, why I persist. I say, “I look into the eyes of our children and see their hopes and dreams. I pray we do not fail them.” In his little book written during the pandemic, Let us Dream, Pope Francis tells us that we have to “become a people.” To encounter one another, rich and poor, share stories and experiences as we work together to solve our problems and build a better future for our children.
We have to face the corrupt who use our democratic institutions for their own selfish ends. We have to fight evil. We must also build the good.
We give thanks in this Mass on the 40th anniversary of EDSA for the gift of our democratic institutions and freedoms. May we be given the grace to persist and persevere in working to make these democratic institutions serve our children and our people.
Preached on 24 Feb, Ateneo Blue Eagle Gym, Ateneo de Manila University, Quezon City.