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What Cory means to me


When I was a teenager, ordinary Filipinos helped depose a tyrant by blocking tanks and offering flowers to soldiers. Few people anywhere in the world can say that and few people will understand the pride and hope it brought me as a young Filipino. The end of the Marcos regime signaled the impending deaths of other authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia and the Edsa revolution of 1986 was the first among the peaceful revolutions that later occurred in Eastern Europe and elsewhere in the world. We can argue about the quality of democracy it “restored" in the Philippines, but that is another story. For now, let me remember the woman at the center of that revolution: Cory Aquino. Cory was the only other president I knew apart from Marcos while I was growing up. The first time I saw her on television was in 1983 during Ninoy’s funeral. When she emerged as the opposition’s presidential candidate two years later, I recall thinking, “Why her?" I thought she was meek and unprepossessing. She spoke softly and appeared calm. She wore glasses and did not even look angry. How could she unite an outraged nation? But she did. The sheer contrast of her demeanor to that of the dictator (and especially the dictator’s wife), her modesty and dignity galvanized us. I wore Cory buttons to school even though I could not even vote yet. I was radicalized during the years of democratic transition in the late 1980s. The slaughter of farmers along Mendiola, the assassinations of Ka Lando Olalia and Lean Alejandro and the massacre of farmers (again) in Lupao in 1987 were equally life-changing events for me and I struggled to reconcile them with the so-called democracy that had just been introduced to an expectant nation. Yet even as I and my fellow student activists were angered by these atrocities, I don’t think many among us really believed that Cory sanctioned them. Attempts to designate Cory as a "class enemy" and an object of hatred just exposed the zealotry of those who espoused them. Nevertheless, there were real failures that can be undeniably attributed to Cory’s presidency, among them her own family’s thwarting of land reform, the missed opportunity to repudiate onerous debts and to assert real independence from US influence. I was among the many who felt bitter and betrayed when Cory tried to convince the Philippine senate to renew the US bases treaty when it ended in 1991. Yet twenty six years since I first came to know of Cory, I am among those who feel orphaned at her passing. And it is not those policies and political decisions that I dwell on, but her life, who she was and what she stood for. For even as we seek to reform institutions and structures, as we search for models upon which to build our democracy, Cory showed us the power and value of personal example. It will have been said a thousand times now but I shall repeat it because it is important to me: Cory was unfailingly kind and gracious. So much so that grown men she had worked with weep openly upon her death and even her neighbors speak fondly of her touching gestures. She was incorruptible -- and this I also emphasize because it is so rare among our leaders to leave office untainted by some scam or another. Cory made sure her own family did not get too close to power or engage in shenanigans. (Okay, she could not do anything about Kris but who can?) The thing I most admire about Cory is that she did her best. Personal excellence is not something that immediately leaps to our minds when we think of Cory. It is only by reading obituaries that we remember that she was valedictorian of her grade school class at St. Scholastica, for example; or that she majored and excelled in French and mathematics in college and was set on a career in law before she married. I truly marvel at how, with every single challenge, Cory did her best. She was the sheltered daughter of a wealthy clan who suddenly found herself subjected to the indignity of being strip-searched on her visits to her jailed husband. She was a housewife with five children who was asked to unite a nation in fighting a tyrant. She was an old woman, content in her retirement, who never faltered in her fight against corruption and made a stand against two presidents who succeeded her. What pain and disappointment Cory must have felt to see the Philippines in the hands of another woman whom she helped put in power in 2001 -- an error of judgment Cory was humble enough to acknowledge in her public apology to Erap. Do you know of anyone else who has apologized? I cringe at the Time magazine obituary that proclaims Cory a "saint" of People Power. Let us resist the temptation to canonize her because it only takes away from the immensity of her achievements. Cory, despite her well-known association with the Catholic church, championed a modern and secular idea: democracy. Yes, Cory was religious, she was prayerful, but she was not a saint. She was a Filipino who did her best when thrust into the most difficult and unfamiliar of circumstances. Some of her responses and decisions, especially when she was in government, were flawed but no one can question the character and spirit of the woman who made them. Pettiness, vulgarity, vindictiveness, hatred, arrogance, greed—these are words we will never associate with Cory. When we think of Cory we remember courage, humility, justice, self-sacrifice and decency. We tend to think of heroism as consisting of dramatic acts: hunger strikes, armed resistance, martyrdom. Seldom do we pause and see heroism in everyday actions. In Cory we saw how each decision had a moral quality to it; that she tried, even in the most ambiguous of predicaments, to determine what was right and wrong, what was just and unjust. It says a lot about the state of our society that one has to be heroic just to stay decent. Cory embodied the best in us and now she is gone. We are orphaned and I am afraid to contemplate our future. - GMANews.TV Carla Montemayor, who used to write for Newsbreak magazine, is currently based in London.

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