PASIG CITY (MindaNews / 23 Feb) — Anthony de Mello, the Jesuit priest and storyteller, once wrote about a tribe that lost the art of making fire.
A wise man taught them the skill. When he died, the priests preserved his tools — the flint, the sticks, the tinder — and placed them in a shrine. They created rituals around them. Songs. Ceremonies. Annual remembrances.
Generations passed. The tribe had everything: the shrine, the rituals, the memory of the firemaker.
But no one knew how to make fire anymore.
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Every February, the Philippines performs its EDSA ritual.
The photographs. The speeches. Cory in yellow. Cardinal Sin on the radio. The tanks that stopped. Ninoy on the tarmac. We sing the songs. We light the candles. We call it remembrance.
We have the rituals. We have the shrine. We have everything.
But there is no fire.
The so-called guardians took it
EDSA 1986 was fire. Real fire. Millions of ordinary Filipinos who decided — without being told, without being organized, without permission — that they were done. They saw clearly what was right and what was rotten. That clarity was enough. The people moved.
Then the so-called guardians arrived.
The political families who built dynasties on the back of that February morning. The institutions that appropriated the language of people power to protect their own power. The coalitions that march every anniversary while reproducing the very structures EDSA was supposed to dismantle. They came — not to carry the fire forward, but to own it. To place it behind glass. To decide who gets to invoke it and when.
They took something that belonged to everyone and made it serve themselves. That is not guardianship. That is misappropriation dressed in ceremony.
Here is what they will never say: no one owns EDSA.
Not the political families. Not the institutions. Not anyone who has been trading on that February morning for forty years.
EDSA belongs to the people who walked onto that highway without knowing how it would end.
The moment the so-called guardians tried to own it, they killed it. They replaced fire with a logo. Now they wonder why the logo no longer moves anyone.
The people are not fooled
Ordinary Filipinos — especially young Filipinos — are told their disengagement is the problem. That staying away from the February ceremonies is apathy. That the generation that wasn’t there doesn’t care.
This is backwards.
People aren’t staying away because they forgot. They’re staying away because they are paying attention. They can see who is using EDSA and why. They can feel the difference between a movement and a mobilization. A movement asks something of you. A mobilization uses you.
Filipinos have been mobilized, used, and left behind for forty years by the very people who shout People Power the loudest — the same haughty ones who act as if the revolution was their inheritance to manage rather than the people’s moment to claim.
That is not apathy. That is judgment.
Learn to make fire
If you are young, here is what I want to say directly to you.
Do not worship the shrine. Do not wait to be summoned. No politician, no opposition coalition, no anniversary march is going to hand you a people power moment and mean it.
But don’t mistake this for powerlessness.
The people of 1986 did not appear from nowhere. They were formed — by years of living under a lie they could no longer accept. By a clarity that built slowly, quietly, until it became impossible to ignore. When the moment came, they already knew what it meant.
That formation is the real work. Not the rally. Not the social media tribute. Not the commemorative program.
Learn to see clearly what is right and what is rotten. Learn to tell the difference between a leader serving the country and a leader serving themselves. Practice that judgment. Build it in yourself. Build it with the people around you.
The next people power will not be organized. It will not arrive on a schedule. It will come when enough Filipinos see clearly again.
Your job is to be one of them.
The tribe needs people who know how to make fire — not more so-called guardians to manage the shrine.
(MindaViews is the opinon section of MindaNews. Bong Montesa of Cagayan de Oro is a lawyer and professor now based in Pasig City. He has spent three decades in conflict and peacebuilding work in the Philippines)
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