August Moon

I’ve always had a distaste for politics, but I love my liberal, libertarian, socialist and communist friends. Long ago, too, I learned that the act of writing is already a political act in itself. One cannot hide behind the journalistic code of objectivity all the time. In the end, you have to make a choice: are you on our side or on the enemy’s? Whether in the home with the threat of domestic violence hanging on one’s head or out on the streets where cruel traps are laid, we face the challenge of choosing, of making a stand.

Dying is easy; it’s the living that’s hard, so a wiseacre said.

Today how I can pose like a placid fence-sitter while I await former President Corazon Aquino’s casket to pass by, not too far from the lobby window of the Manila Diamond Hotel? I’ve been here since 12 noon. People with yellow shirts or yellow ribbons tied around their arms have been lining up the sidewalk since the sun rose.

I’m on a comfortable seat; my need to constantly pee has kept me from joining them. Yellow banners with the silkscreened image of Sen. Aquino festoon the street lamps. Manila is Cory City, Mayor Lim, whom she endorsed as her presidentiable in 1998, has seen to that. Suddenly, Dirty Alfred Lim smells clean

My partner Rolly and my friend Anna Leah Sarabia rushed out, he with an umbrella and still-intact power of observation, she with her camera and feistiness, to await the six-wheeler truck carrying the casket.

We never thought we’d make it this far—Rolly, Anna, me. We had other plans for the day. Rolly wanted to get back to Baguio to be in time for his pet dog’s dinner and his 7 a.m. class tomorrow at the University of the Philippines there.

Anna was supposed to give me a pep talk and repeat her old line about women’s rights being human rights. After which I was scheduled for a 2 p.m. meeting with Anvil Publishing’s Gwenn Galvez to map out the launching of The Baguio We Know, a two-year-in-the-making anthology of essays by Baguio’s finest, timed for the Sept. 1 celebration of the highland city’s centennial.

But all good plans were thrown in the waste basket. We decided to bear witness today. As we ate a hurried lunch at a nearby Vietnamese restaurant, memories of the August 21, 1983, assassination of President Aquino’s husband Ninoy came back vividly. So did the anger at the current lying and thieving Presidency. At one point, Anna thought aloud, “Gosh! GMA makes Marcos and Erap look like saints!”

Rolly tried to be facetious to deflect the tension. Perhaps, he surmised, the Filipinos are just longing for a happening like today’s march. No, I said, they had been waiting for the right time and occasion. Anna agreed, pointing out that we are moving towards a full moon, a lunar eclipse is going to happen. The moon, ah, for me who swears by its inconstancy, is what moves the masses. The sun represents the leaders, the moon moves the masses. Expect something to happen to an awakened people.

It was the same Anna who said, around the time the Marcos’s star was dimming, that the Filipino is like a carabao—hardworking, patient, etc. But once pushed to its limit, it gores its own master.

Two months ago, another friend said, half in resignation, half in bottled-up exasperation, that people were thinking, “Gloria (Macapagal-Arroyo) has a year to go. They just want to ride it out instead of protesting. Maybe change will come after the 2010 elections.”

Apparently, we’re near breaking point like the time Sen. Aquino was treacherously “salvaged,” to use Sen. Saguisag’s so very apt word. I never thought the line “Tama na, sobra na, palitan na” would resonate again with such vibrant, refreshing beauty, rid now of its cliché quality