Saan ba dapat lumugar kapag hindi ka dilawan at tutol ka rin sa pagiging abusado ng estado? Today, the Philippine Daily Inquirer talked about a divided nation but I don’t think I agree with the dividing line–or at least, I have reservations. Being “yellow” and “pro-Duterte” are just some aspects of being Filipino and if the nation is divided as such then I’m afraid the limit of our political imagination is so narrow and obtuse, with our lenses unable to see the whole beyond these very noisy parts. I did not go to EDSA because I worship the yellows. I went because I read history and I understand the meaning of the 1986 People Power Revolution to us as a nation–despite being born two years after the fact. Yes, it was a fact.

So many people from my parent’s generation have tried to convince me to let this shit go. EDSA, in their view, was a failure because nothing’s changed blah blah blah and it was only about the elite’s blah blah blah. Every time I hear this being told to me, I bite my tongue in exasperation, hoping the topic would naturally switch so I won’t have to be my parent’s rude child. But as of late, the historical revisionism rife in their tirades has forced me to be a bit more vocal and aggressive.

Someone asked me once whether the Philippines had the equivalent of a ‘deep state.’ I told him I didn’t think so, not least because my impression of the bureaucracy is one of rent-maximizing machines with no coherent agenda, let alone one which could work to depose a sitting government. What we do have is what I would call an infrastructure of liberal democratic norms fully embedded in civil society, in part funded by and therefore implicated in the global liberal order. The latter may refer to big United Nations programs, for example the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are locally implemented. These are the non-governmental organizations who often advocate on specific policy issues – be it the environment, freedom of press or disaster management.