symbols are worth a hundred thousand

symbols are worth a hundred thousand Araneta Center does not resonate with Edsa, it resonates with Chicago and the more geriatric performers from the 1950s and 1960s that want have been flocking to it of late.

Relocating Edsa to the Araneta Center sends a different kind of message, whatever the spoken words are. It makes it out to be just another show or concert, not unlike the one Manny Villar put up in the Mall of Asia. The celebration of Edsa at the Edsa Shrine does not reduce Edsa to a matter of numbers: It doesn’t matter whether you have 10 or 10,000.

The celebration of Edsa at the Araneta Center does: It has to be more patok than Willie Revillame’s. The Inquirer did not get it wrong when it reported: “Aquino, Villar rock to People Power politics.” That was how it looked.

Edsa has no power only if you make it so. The glory of Edsa is gone only if you make it so. Only if, as Eggie Apostol said the other day, you think of it as something that happened in the past, to be recalled like an event deserving of a Sunday crowd in a place that does not inconvenience people with traffic.

Only if you think of it as a unique event that cannot happen again, notwithstanding that its story line of people despairing of their lot in life under an oppressor and glimpsing the light of hope in someone who can help them overcome it is right there for all the world to see. Only if your heart does not give you the eyes to see, and say, “The Revolution was, and remains, an ongoing struggle in the minds and hearts of the people.”