Static on the Airwaves: EDSA at Forty (Redux)
or: "On Selective Memory, Manufactured Amnesia,
and the Politics of Relevance"
“I find it hard to understand why this bloodless revolution has become the standard definition of freedom for our country and this standard is forced down our throats by a certain group of individuals who think they are better than everyone else.”
— Sara Duterte, then Mayor of Davao City, February 24, 2017
“People must have already forgotten the essence of the 1986 EDSA Revolution. That is why those who march or organize do not really know what message they are bringing to the public—because they themselves have forgotten what the message was in 1986.”
— Sara Duterte, Vice President, February 24, 2026
Forty years on, the signal from EDSA still cuts through the static—though not without interference from those who now find themselves politically stranded between memory and ambition.
The attempt to downgrade the 1986 People Power Revolution into an elitist catechism—an imposition of the sanctimonious few upon the pliant many—would be laughable if it were not so calculated. What we are witnessing is not a debate over historical interpretation but a contest over relevance. And relevance, in these times, is a scarce commodity among those who once mistook proximity to power for permanence within it.
It is no accident that the renewed commentary from Vice President Duterte arrives at a moment when opposition voices—long fragmented, long dismissed—have begun to find common cause in the language of accountability. Nor is it incidental that the refrain now echoing through the streets—“All those involved must be held accountable”—has been selectively heard, as though it were a coded message aimed exclusively at one family name.
Yet history, unlike politics, is not so easily compartmentalized.
When progressive blocs and civic formations pressed forward toward the EDSA Shrine this week—despite police efforts to halt their advance—they did so not merely to commemorate the fall of one dictatorship, but to interrogate the persistence of its logic in new guises. Among those present were members of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan and the Kilusang Bayan Kontra Kurakot, groups whose political memory extends well beyond the convenience of electoral cycles.
Their slogans—"Never Again, Never Forget"—were not nostalgic invocations. They were warnings.
Warnings that impunity, once normalized, does not remain confined to the era that produced it. That the culture of unaccountability cultivated under one administration may find eager heirs in the next—or the previous. That the call to hold “all those involved” to account cannot, by its very phrasing, exempt those who now seek to position themselves as critics of the very order they helped consolidate.
For the Vice President’s lament—that today’s marchers have forgotten the essence of EDSA—betrays an anxiety less about historical amnesia than about historical recall. The recall of policies defended. Of excesses rationalized. Of institutions bent toward expediency in the name of security. The recall of a political climate in which dissent was treated as destabilization, and accountability as obstructionism.
In such a climate, the invocation of EDSA becomes less an act of remembrance than an act of reclamation—by those who would narrow its meaning to a single chapter safely closed, and by those who insist that its unfinished sentences continue to be written in the present tense.
President Bongbong Marcos may occupy Malacañang today, but the grammar of power that EDSA sought to disrupt remains conjugated across administrations. The demand that “all those involved must be held accountable” is not a partisan cudgel. It is a civic imperative. And it applies with equal force to yesterday’s allies and today’s adversaries alike.
That some now feign surprise at this inclusivity is itself revealing.
For EDSA was never a monument to selective justice. It was, and remains, an argument—one that refuses to distinguish between the abuses of the past and those of the present based on convenience or coalition. An argument that sovereignty resides not in the reputations of families but in the vigilance of citizens. An argument that freedom, if it is to endure, must be defended not only against the ghosts of dictatorship but against its reincarnations in democratic attire.
And so the marchers came—not as custodians of a forgotten message, but as its latest authors.
They came not because they had misunderstood 1986, but because they understood 2026 all too well.