Antonio C. Abaya - Outpouring of Love

It could not have been anything but an outpouring of Love. Hundreds of thousands of people from all social and economic classes, standing for hours in the rain and occasional bursts of blistering sunshine, to line the streets for the privilege of shouting â€œCory! Cory! Cory!.â€ for several seconds as the funeral cortege threaded its way through the sea of humanity.

It was Edsa 1, Part 2, with the familiar yellow ribbons, the Laban sign, and yellow and black t-shirts, the â€œhindi ka nag-iisaâ€ slogans,. All the more remarkable because, unlike her beloved husbandâ€™s in 1983, her death was not from an assassinâ€™s bullet but from an act of God with whom she had always had a special relationship more cosmic than conjugal.

The Cory phenomenon that began with her birth as a neophyte politician in late 1985, when she accepted the United Oppositionâ€™s draft to be its presidential candidate in the snap elections of February 1986, and ended with her death from colon cancer and burial in August 2009, shows that Filipinos respond more readily to Love rather than to Hate.

One recalls the many demonstrations and rallies against President Arroyo, organized by the opposition trapos and the Communists in the past four years, which drew only several thousands, including mobs-for-hire recruited from Mayor Binayâ€™s squatter colonies.

Compared to which the spontaneous outpouring of Love from hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life, even in driving rain, for a political leader who was not even a roaring success as a presumed reformer, defies all political categories for a rational explanation.

It helped that she was seen by many in contra-distinction with the incumbent president, so widely disliked by so many, not the least for her megalomaniac maneuvers to remain in power beyond the end of her presidential term. Cory, on the other hand, never thought of staying in power beyond the constitutional limits and looked forward to handing power over to her duly
elected successor.

In the present context, it also helped that Coryâ€™s youngest daughter Kris, who already has millions of fans from her TV shows, was seen by them as a Sorrowing Madonna, beautiful and telegenic even when she was tearfully narrating the ordeal of her family as their mother struggled to fight the cancer that was consuming her life away.

The Requiem Mass for her at the Manila Cathedral and the long funeral procession to the Manila Memorial Park through a sea of mourning humanity were a fitting finale to a life originally devoted to housewifely and motherly duties, but through the accident of events beyond her control, suddenly thrust to a political limelight not of her choosing.

(*A personal note*. Not used to waking up at 5:00 am to be at the Cathedral at 8:00, I nodded off several times during Mass, except during the magnificent choral and vocal numbers. Which caused my pew-mate to jab me with her elbow and nudge me with her thigh several times. But I protested with the ninth beatitude: *Blessed are those who sleep during Mass, for they shall dream of God. *Amen, amen.)

So what was the legacy of Corazon Aquino? Simply that she was instrumental in dismantling the Marcos dictatorship. She did not have any plans for a New Jerusalem, and she did not proceed to try to build one. Her only frame of reference in governance was the pre-1972 configuration of our polity. To the extent that she restored that configuration, she was successful. Those who, like me, had expected more from her, were disappointed.

In hindsight, her watershed mistake was in mixing pro-Communists and anti-Communist members in her Cabinet, perhaps on the motherly instinct that she could get her noisily quarreling children to live and work together if only she could ladle out equal measures of Love to both sides.

But it was not to be. According to my neighbor and TV co-host , the late Teddy Benigno, who served as Coryâ€™s press secretary, the conflict between the warring camps sometimes erupted in shouting matches and even in challenges to fisticuffs during Cabinet meetings, from which President Aquino would flee to another room, there to cry in frustration.

It did not stop there. Apparently influenced by perceived pro-Communists in her Cabinet, President Aquino released from detention the top Communists bagged by the military, including Joma Sison, founding chair of the Communist Party of the Philippines.

(Sison subsequently went on self-exile to the Netherlands, from which he waged a media campaign badmouthing President Aquino to ruin her chances of being awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1987.)

Needless to say, Jomaâ€™s release from detention did not sit well with the military or the anti-Communists in the Cabinet. No wonder the military, led by then Col. Gringo Honasan tried twice to overthrow her, first in August 1987, then in Nov-Dec 1989. There were other plots in between, but only these two putsches amounted to a real organized effort to topple her.

After the August 1987 coup attempt, I was asked by Vice President Salvador Laurel to accompany him on a week-long Saturday-to-Saturday tour of 13 military camps, from Nueva Ecija to Davao, during which Laurel talked to officers and enlisted men, separately, to hear at first hand the causes of military discontent.

Midweek, I reported in my column in *BusinessWorld* that unless President Aquino fired the perceived pro-Communists in her Cabinet, â€œshe would face a military mutiny of epic proportions.â€

The following Friday, while VP Laurel was talking to the officers in Davao, President Aquino called and informed Laurel that she was firing her *entire* Cabinet, including Laurel who was concurrent foreign affairs secretary.

This in itself created its own problem of morale. The military had demanded that Executive Secretary Joker Arroyo and other perceived pro-Communists be fired from the Cabinet. The military DID NOT demand the ouster of Finance Secretary Jimmy Ongpin.

But in firing everyone, including Ongpin, President Aquino may have driven Ongpin into clinical depression and eventual suicide the following December. The talk at that time was that it was Joker Arroyo who convinced Cory to fire everyone, and that he also demanded that Ongpin be fired ahead of him (Joker).

The lessons from this story seem to be a) Love cannot solve problems of state even if it is ladled out in equal measure to all warring sides; and b) our next revolutionary government should be ideologically homogenous. Trying to please all sectors by giving them seats in the junta-government merely ends up displeasing everyone.

Love is simply not enough, or even appropriate, to run a country as fractious as the Philippines.

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