PUBLISHED:
iThink
Students & Campuses
Manila Bulletin
August 5, 2009
Page F-4
It is always difficult to speak about someone whom you have no real memories of.
Even for a figure as monumental as Cory Aquino’s, whose life and memory are deeply intertwined with our country’s, I am hard-pressed to find the words that can truly capture what she has meant to me.
I have never met her. I know her only in the sense that one knows a public figure by reading about her or seeing her on TV. In terms of being a real, tangible person in my life, I do not know Tita Cory.
But I do know her in terms of her work in shaping our history, and the fruits of that labor which we now enjoy. I know her by her speeches, her prayer rallies and her yellow ribbons. Most importantly, I know her through the fact that I am free to say No to Con-Ass and be out past ten at night.
I am acquainted with Tita Cory as an icon, a champion of democracy. Even after her term, she had somehow always been the stern and watchful mother of our young republic; the lurking, often uninvited, conscience of Philippine politics. In many important ways, she is a figure larger than life, towering and at the same time permeating our everyday existence.
Yet what makes Tita Cory most extraordinary was the fact that she remained ordinary.
Behind the accolades was a woman who had always seen herself as no more than an ordinary person, placed by Providence at the head of other ordinary people. She was simply a faithful wife, one who finished the work that her husband started. She was thrust violently into political leadership and accepted it, despite being derided for being nothing more than a plain housewife.
But our nation’s drama would have played out differently had this plain housewife rejected the part she was asked to play.
In the end, it will not mattered so much that she had made mistakes. It will not matter that her term’s first three years were marked by incessant attempts at military takeover. She will not have been nothing more than a transition president. History inevitably judges us by our results, but it is not these results that we will remember her by.
In Spanish, her first name means ‘heart’, and it was with heart that she presided over a fledgling democracy. It would be foolish to say now that Cory was ill-equipped for politics—she was born into a family that dealt exclusively with aristocrats and politicians. But despite the reality of realpolitik, she had remembered to make decisions based on her moral and ideological foundations.
She knew that her task was to revive a country, not to divide it among the armed and the powerful as spoils. In the process, she had been misunderstood and often misrepresented. She was also forced to make compromises, but in the end, she had ruled the nation, her stubborn and unruly child, in the best way that she knew how: as a stern but nurturing mother.
Tita Cory only did what she was tasked to do in the best way she knew how. To put it in that way makes it sound so simple, but in the course of our lives, this is all that we can ask of ourselves and most other people. To do what she had to do in the way she knew how was perhaps the most difficult thing of all.
But the legacy of Tita Cory is so much more than just our political institutions. It is more than the overthrow of an oppressive dictatorship or the freedoms that we now enjoy.
I believe that her greatest gift of all is that moment when she decided to fly from Cebu to join the crowds that had gathered in Metro Manila, for it was in that moment that she revived in us a sense of who we are and who we could be. Without that, we would never have shown the world that the struggle for freedom, though it comes at a high price, can be won without shedding a single drop of blood.
In offering herself, she had given us heart, and inspired us to offer our hearts to others. And it was only through heart that we were able to win back our nation.
Tita Cory had once said that freedom and democracy are really hard to come by, “and that it is mainly by perseverance that one is won and the other is kept.” And in a time where it is easy to lose sight of what he had fought for, it is most important for us to hold on to her gifts.
If we are to honor her memory, it will be by seeing to it that her efforts were not in vain.
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