it is time for us all to decide who we are

have you asked of yourself what's the price you might pay? or is it simply a game for rich young boys to play? the color of the world is changing, day by day... red: the blood of angry men! black: the dark of ages past! red: a world about to dawn! black: the night that ends at last!"

i hear helicopters overhead. i hear tinny, furious shouts from loudspeakers in the distance. i hear my mobile beep messages asking me to stay at home (here, safe in my dorm room) or inviting me to take to the streets (not at EDSA this time, but at the Ayala-Paseo de Roxas intersection, a few minutes walk away.)

i heard that professor randy david was “detained” this morning. walking over to ninoy’s statue, i heard cory tell gloria to make the ultimate sacrifice and resign. walking among the crowd, i saw the poor and the marginalized.

i saw the farmers and the fishers and the workers (and a song from high school started to play in my mind: "is freedom a farmer with no land to farm? is freedom a fisher with no river to fish? is freedom a worker with no place to work? and yet they said, 'freedom is at hand!'"). i saw the students. i saw the women. i saw the religious. i saw the left, i saw the right. how i wish i could say that i didn’t see the politicians, but alas, they were also there.

i saw the scramble of some to make a living in the sea of hopeful/hopeless faces. i heard the shouts of anger and the whispers of frustration. i smelled the unwashed bodies. i tasted the tension of the struggle to be heard.

we were there for the same reason, but we were not the same.

i asked myself, "why?"
we were there because we had been forgotten by the very people who promised us liberation. we were there because we vowed that the spectre of martial law would never again haunt our waking dreams. we were there because we demanded our rights to peaceably assemble, to express our opinions, to equity.

we were there for the same reason, but we were not the same.

i asked myself, “where?”
where were the middle class? where were the upper class? there was a very light sprinkling, to be sure, but we were not enough to make a crucial difference. they weren’t there because they had a roof over their heads, because they could have three meals a day with snacks in between, because they could insulate themselves from the reality of poverty.

we were there for the same reason, but we were not the same.

looking up at ninoy, i was ashamed of my class.

i went home in the early evening knowing (deep down in my heart where the Silence resides) that ayala wasn’t going to be "people power three"--or people power four, depending on how you’re counting.

there will never be another people power. unless the people can be there for the same reason... and be the same.