to a lost heroine

Maria Corazon Cojuangco Aquino
25 January 1933 - 1 August 2009

This morning the cerulean sky casts its downpour of tears on EDSA. Along its hurried streets and busy motorists hurrying to the first workweek of August, the asphalt glistens like any other day yet a disquieting gloom permeates the masses being moved in the thousands. This is no regular rainy-day Monday. Beyond the wet roads and the slippery traffic altercations is a stillness of an absence that we feared will come more sooner than later. The heavens wail in mourning of the passing of an unequivocally singular soul whose struggle for the upholding of our treasured democracy have inspired generations the world over. In a time when political turmoil besets our land and the blatant brandishing of corruption has become the de facto practice, we mourn in silence to a lost spirit, further igniting the flames of social unrest.

We seek validation in the faceless masses whose devotion has kept the lines along Greenhills, Mandaluyong headstrong. We pause in contemplation that beyond the strife that we face each day, and the poverty that engulfs our fellowmen, we are all one and the same. People of a proud nation seeking the justice we deserve in the eyes of our elected leaders, whose selfish meanderings have proven that in this day and age of gender and social equality, the elite inhabits our halls with the prideful indulgence and a false sense of self-entitlement.

In every man and woman, elder and child, burns a longing for the very values her late husband, and she herself, have stood for, for the past three decades. In each of us is a Ninoy, whose voice, although wavering and still at times, remains a reminder that equality and freedom is a birth right. We may oft times be undeserving of this in the manner we conduct ourselves towards our countrymen and in our affairs, but the truth is we do have the capacity to change all of this. Not all is lost amidst the darkness of our social dissolution, nor is failed in the impending wrath of economic downfall. Change is achievable, and it starts with the man whose face gazes beyond our silvery reflections.

Our nation weeps in the gaping absence that will never be filled. She has left us with a legacy that remains to be vindicated. A heroine wise beyond her years, whose integrity defeats her own social standing.

She will be sorely missed.

Let us not wait for another loss to effect change in our consciousness. Free will is a gift that comes with the responsibility of our race. It is the very thing that sets our species apart from our fauna brethren. Yet it also is the very thing that deems us at times worse than them. May we find direction in the life she has lived and realize the change that our generation can initiate. Here and now.

Let her color shine brightest in the darkest of our hours.

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Postscript 12:48pm
The crowd was emotional as she passed through the streets she once threaded some 23 odd years ago, catalyzing a cascade of events that lead to the downfall of a dictatorship. I will, time and opportunity permits, upload the footage and images I took of her brief visit to Makati later this day for the benefit of those whose circumstances prevented them to pay their respects. May we never forget who she is and what she stands for.