Whenever I write about the 1986 EDSA Revolution, I tend to underscore one thing: I am part of the generation that grew up after it all happened. At the time, I was seven months old. Suffice to say, I wasn’t in EDSA. I have no EDSA story to tell.
Yet if anything it is my generation that was taught the most about EDSA. It was my generation that reaped what was sowed on the streets on those four days, and the years that led to it. We were the first generation of Filipinos that grew up with no living memory of what it’s like to not be under the iron hand of Asia’s most infamous – and venerated – dictator.
My teachers and professors all shared an impression of Marcos that somehow stuck: an articulate man commanding of so much respect whose intentions for a “mandate for greatness” was marked by human flaws, like the thirst for power and the desire for great personal gain. He was “the greatest president the Philippines could have ever had,” if not for a catalog of reasons that included, among other things, Martial Law.