DAKILA

Theres The Rub
Power

By Conrado de Quiros
Philippine Daily Inquirer

Last Wednesday I attended an interesting gathering at Conspiracy Bar/Café in Quezon City, a place that quite incidentally now has a streamer on top of its door saying: “For conspiring against the public, replace Gloria and her entire Cabinet!” The event was the launching of a campaign called “Dakila Ka.”

“Dakila Ka” [You Are Great] is the brainchild of several singers/artists belonging to a group called “Dakila” that has been trying to get the youth to take part in social life or contribute to their country, whichever comes first, through art. Specifically through singing and drawing/painting, the two things Filipinos excel at. “Dakila Ka” raises this to a higher level at a time “of great upheaval” in the country: “We are not exempted from the responsibility of contributing to positive change.”

The highlight of the event was the singing by some of this country’s best known singers/artists of the song, “Kaya Mong Maging Dakila” [You Can Be Great], written by Noel Cabangon, which they hope will become the youth’s anthem. The song is a catchy one, with strong lyrics and a stronger melody, and should have no problem achieving its goal. Its message is simple: You can be a hero. You can achieve great deeds by doing simple things, like speaking your truth, which in this country now takes on the aspect of supreme heroism.

Seemingly a small thing in the vast scheme of things (when “Dakila Ka” was launched last Wednesday the world was agog about the rally on Friday), it is in fact a huge thing in our hitherto narrow view of things. I suddenly remembered something Archbishop Angel Lagdameo, the head of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, said some weeks ago, which was that he himself was plugging for “a new kind of people power,” one that would depend less on authority figures, such as bishops and politicians, gods and generals, and more on ordinary folk to show the way. Ordinary folk doing ordinary things that out of the utter blackness became blinding shafts of light, individual folk doing individual things that by accumulation turned into a tidal wave of change. Jun Lozada had shown the way. He had shown that one person doing a simple thing, like telling the truth, could rock (and roll) the world.

I confess that when I first heard this, I thought I was hearing a copout. I thought I was hearing an excuse for the bishops to fiddle around while Rome burned. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized the wisdom of those words.

I remembered that shortly before EDSA People Power II, I was thinking along those lines. Indeed later, I would go on to wonder if EDSA II hadn’t happened too fast too soon. The reason for that was that I had found the impeachment trial of Joseph Estrada not just awesomely inspiring but dazzlingly educational. It was a lesson in civics taught brilliantly. It allowed the public to become not just a passive spectator but an active participant.

Its immense popularity guaranteed that it would reach the pit of low-rent tenements as much as the heart of posh villages. Overnight, it redeemed law in the eyes of the people, proving that law was not the devil talking in disguise but God speaking in tongues of fire. Such was its impact that everyone was mouthing legalese in arguments at one point. It certainly crashed sitcoms in a big way. All in all, it demonstrated to us, probably for the first time in our lives, what a beautiful thing democracy was, or could be. Indeed, it demonstrated to us, probably for the first time in our lives, what democracy really was: It was, first and last, about the People. It was, first and last, about us.

I personally did not want that trial to end. I wanted it to go on and on. The longer it took, I thought, the stronger it would drive home the point about democracy to the public mind. But it did end, alas, with its lesson barely learned.

Ironically, what we know as people power, which we’ve had a couple of times, has never really had the people in it. Or the people were there only in the beginning, in the toppling of a tyranny, but not in the end, in the building of a new world. I can understand why many Filipinos have become wary, or disillusioned, about people power, because all it has signified is the trading of one set of leaders for another. In the case of EDSA II the successor being worse than the succeeded, a moral dwarf denigrating, damning, and outlawing the very thing that brought her to power. If that’s the kind of people power we’ll have again, then I’d cop out of that too.

None of this is to say we shouldn’t have bold and visionary leaders anymore. All of this is to say we can’t, and shouldn’t, rely on them alone. The strength of democracy is not its leaders, the strength of democracy is its people. The role of the people in people power does not end with the ousting of a tyrant, it begins with it. That is the point to harp on, and build on, the next time we mount people power, which will probably be soon. That is the only guarantee this one won’t end up like the last two.

We do need to exercise “communal action” but that’s so not just in filling the streets up like New Year’s Eve to drive another demon away. That’s also in demanding from the new government an accounting of itself to us, the people, from Day One and not when the rottenness has festered from being ignored and tolerated. We can, and should, be “dakila” [great] not just in risking life and limb to meet the tanks and the phalanx of truncheon-wielding cops but in rising above ourselves to fight the scarier demons of helplessness and cynicism in everyday life. I’ve said it before and I say it again: Easiest thing for us to die for freedom, hardest thing for us to live for it.

We are the people, we are what make for people power. It’s time we stopped saying, “Ang mamatay nang dahil sa ’yo” and started saying, “Ang mabuhay nang para sa ’yo.”