No one can afford to be in the sidelines in this BENECO fight, jwhen just being counted is enough
Pre-Semester Non-Lecture Analysis 42
Someone asked me today, “what can I do about this BENECO crisis, especially now that men with guns are involved?”
My answer was to repeat the question, “What can YOU do? Nothing. But what can you AND OTHERS do…that’s a different story.”
Watch all those flashback TV news coverages of the EDSA People Power protest again, especially at the very height of it when an estimated 4-5 million people gathered in EDSA. What were most people doing, apart from those few isolated dramatic flashpoints all the TV cameras were focused on?
Perhaps 90% of the people were doing NOTHING. They were standing around. That’s the reason why the media had to report that millions of these people were in EDSA. Forget the heroics of the celebrity figures of that made-for-TV uprising. It was the MERE PRESENCE of those nameless, faceless Filipino masses doing the humble act of just being there TO BE COUNTED that defined the sublime glory of the day.
These were not the flashy, swashbuckling jump-from-a-helicopter-with-large-snake-around-your-neck kind of people. These unlettered pedestrians with no name, fame, rank or stature were not being interviewed live.
If you gathered all the glamorous names and faces of EDSA, you can fit them in a bus. If you drove that bus away and took those glamorous people out of the equation, it would not have changed the outcome of EDSA People Power. But if you took away the other 4,999,950 anonymous bystanders that day, there would be no EDSA. And the Marcos family would have no need of staging a comeback today. They would have never left.
That’s how BIG a contribution to history it is to just BE COUNTED when it mattered most.
So I told my friend if you want to help in this BENECO crisis, just show up. Just show up.
Don’t put any pressure on yourself to solve the problem. You can’t. No ONE PERSON can. Mayor Benjie Magalong can’t, and this good old soldier hasn’t stopped breaking his neck trying. If you’ll be there, a friend will join you. Her friend will join him. His friend will join her. Just keep pressing “control-C” then “control-V” over and over and watch it snowball.
“Can’t I just pray?” of course you can. When you arrive there, you can do anything you want.
The author is a writer and lawyer based in Baguio City, Philippines. Former editor of the Gold Ore and Baguio City Digest, professor of journalism, political science and law at Baguio Colleges Foundation (BCF). He is a photographer and video documentarist. He has a YouTube channel called “Parables and Reason”