Benigno Aquino III — Noynoy — hasn’t been gone long, only four years this week, on June 24 to be exact, but, doubtless, many need reminding, for his tendency toward self-effacement did not help his nation’s short memory.
Not to mention, efforts are undertaken to distort or falsify or altogether erase all memory of him and his family. How all these efforts could make any gain even as they appear patently self-serving and fraudulent in the face of all-too-recent history is just incredible.
Noynoy was an only son to the martyr Ninoy and former President Cory — he who took an assassin’s bullet fighting the martial-law regime of Ferdinand Marcos, and she who picked up the pieces of democracy and put them back together again after Marcos had thrashed it and went on to rule by torture, murder, and plunder for 14 years.
In fact, the bloodless popular uprising that drove Marcos out of power, in 1986, revolved around Ninoy and Cory. It has come to be known as People Power, a phenomenon copied by other nations with desperate longings for freedom. Effectively, People Power had been a convergence of street protests provoked by Ninoy’s murder, in 1983; it led to Cory’s snap-election challenge to Marcos and culminated in her eventual installation as his democratic successor.
Though elected in the normal course, Noynoy may be said an emergency president himself (2010-2016): he presided over a backsliding nation, and, definitely, did rise to the occasion. On his turn, the economy grew steadiest and highest on the average in two generations (6.2%), poverty declined dramatically (5%), and, as shown by the polls, citizens had never felt safer from criminality. So far as I could observe, he enabled all that by looking hardest at the budget and making sure taxpayer money was distributed according to socio-moral standards.
I had thought that the man must be truly serious about equitable leadership when he set the tone of his presidency by deferring to the people as his “true bosses” and, for one of his first official acts, banning from the streets the loudest and most ubiquitous symbol of privilege — normally allowed only for ambulances and police cars out in an emergency, the wang-wang,in this privileged case,warns motorists, siren screaming and lights blinking, Here comes the king of the road!
Unlike nearly all presidents before him, when his term was done, Noynoy stepped down untainted by corruption or any form of official excess. He had no illusions he could set things right “in six years or 10,” said Jet Villarin in his homily, but he gave us “a glimpse of the right way.”
Father Jet celebrated Mass on his death anniversary at the gravesite where he and his parents were laid. It was the only open gravesite in its immediate vicinity, emblematic, I thought, of the quality of their leadership.
I had been easing myself into semiretirement from the news business when Noynoy came to office. But intrigued and driven by professional habit, I found myself following his presidency as keenly as the circumstances permitted, and, as an old hand, I even found myself being asked sometimes for public comments about his governance. That’s why when he left us I had reason to feel, for myself and everyone else, an especially deep sense of loss.
Here are some of the words I had managed at that very moment — words, as happens, preserved on tape and now sent me for my own reminding on this fourth observance of Noynoy’s passing:
“Very rarely…are his noble deeds recalled, [and that’s because] he cared absolutely nothing about himself, and we [ourselves] care little about proper praise and proper gratitude [which] seems…in our nature: we are either ashamed or afraid of our history.”
To be sure, Noynoy’s part in history was not without its flaws — of which proving the most haunting was the tragic miscalculation in the operation against Moro rebels in Mamasapano town, in Maguindanao del Sur, where the lives of 44 helpless troops were lost on January 25, 2015. But, all in all, there’s nothing about Noynoy’s presidency to be ashamed or afraid of. Indeed, his presidency left us more memories to celebrate than did nearly all the others in all of contemporary times. But to what advantage?
A journalist all my life, as such hardened in the professional virtue of skepticism, I’d rather defer to Father Jet for answers. Being Jesuit and physicist, he seems to me better trained and placed for sorting out such, to me, mere happy flukes of history as People Power. With a characteristic long view, he now seems to see a connection between the “glimpse of the right way” Noynoy afforded us and the promise held out from the “marginal outcomes” for the right way in the last midterm elections. – Rappler.com
