A Pastoral Reflection
As we mark the 40th anniversary of the EDSA People Power Revolution, one may remember the story of the frog in boiling water. If you take a frog and suddenly throw it into a pot of boiling water, it will react immediately. It will feel the danger at once, its instincts will awaken, and it will jump out to save itself. But if you place that same frog into a pot of cool water, something different happens. The frog settles. It feels comfortable because there is no immediate threat. Then, slowly, the heat is turned on. The temperature rises little by little, so gradually that the frog does not notice the danger. Its body adjusts. It adapts. It endures. As the water warms, the frog becomes weaker, but it does not resist. As the heat intensifies, it loses the strength to jump. But by then, it is too late. It never realized it was being cooked.
Forty years ago, the Philippines was thrown into boiling water.
The heat in 1986 was undeniable and sudden. The assassination of Ninoy Aquino, the blatant theft of a snap election, and the violent, suffocating grip of a decades-long dictatorship were scorching realities. Like a frog dropped directly into a boiling pot, the nation’s survival instinct kicked in immediately. We felt the intense danger. When the call went out over Radio Veritas to protect the defecting military leaders, millions of unarmed Filipinos – students, professionals, the urban poor, and the religious – rushed to Epifanio de los Santos Avenue. Faced with advancing tanks, we knelt, prayed, and formed a human barricade. We thrashed against the heat of authoritarianism, and with one collective, desperate leap, we jumped out. We called that leap “People Power.”
Today, the danger is different.
We are no longer thrown into boiling water. Instead, we are placed in cool water that is slowly, deliberately being heated. The changes are subtle. The discomfort is gradual. Truth blurs. Silence becomes normal. The heat today does not scald us instantly like Martial Law did. Instead, it lulls us to sleep, drawing us into the warmth of comfortable indifference, where we scroll past injustice because it has become “normal.” It begins with the simmering of historical revisionism, where the truth of our past is slowly diluted until lies begin to taste like facts. From there, it deepens into the slow boil of poverty, where injustice is normalized and the poor are blamed for their hunger while corruption is rebranded as “strategy.” And it intensifies, ironically, into an alarmingly tepid acceptance of injustice, where corruption, impunity, and the erosion of human dignity persist unchecked because we have learned not only to endure them, but to expect them.
The tragedy of the 40th anniversary is not that we have forgotten how to jump; it is that we no longer realize we are burning. We have adjusted our body temperature to the corruption, the impunity, and the lies. We float in the water, mistaking the dangerous heat for a comforting bath, unaware that our muscles are weakening and our will to resist is cooking away. We have been conditioned to call our slow death “resilience.” This conditioning is not an accident. The very people romanticizing our endurance are the ones turning up the heat. Those who profit from our quiet suffering are the ones praising our ability to survive it.
Those tending the fire do not need martial law to keep us docile; they only need to keep us entertained by the quick, dopamine-inducing hits of short reels, and the curated echo chambers of social media. Even our modern conveniences serve as painkillers. The ease of affordable travel and the isolated comfort of working from home create personal bubbles. They insulate us from the grinding realities outside our doors. We mistake our individual convenience for national progress, completely unaware that while we are comfortably watching screens, the water around us is coming to a boil. It is an intentional, slow killing.
All these machineries and strategies are meant to sedate our conscience, sanitize the brutal reality of injustices, and silence our resistance. To enchant us even more, they take something deeply true and use it against us: they hijack the genuine Filipino Resilience.
We know our people are truly resilient. But the perpetrators romanticize this suffering to excuse their own failures. The genuine struggles for fair harvests, land rights, and decent housing are projected on our feeds as heartwarming tests of the Filipino spirit. They praise the poor for surviving on crumbs so they excuse themselves from their duty to provide a just table. The perpetrators rely on our endless capacity to bear injustice, knowing we will vent our anger into
the void of social media rather than into the streets. The slow erosion of human rights and the simmering of historical revisionism continue because our outrage is safely contained within our screens. We are applauded for our ability to smile through systemic crises. This spectacle absorbs the shock of crushing inequality, absolving the puppeteers who control the heat from any real accountability. They applaud our endurance so they never have to turn off the stove.
Because we are sedated and enchanted, we actively enable the perpetrators by intentionally keeping a blind eye. We turn away from the truth simply because acknowledging it is inconvenient. It disrupts our curated feeds and our comfortable bubbles. By choosing the comfort of the slowly heating water over the painful necessity of jumping, we grant the perpetrators silent permission to keep the stove burning.
The perpetrators no longer need a dictator’s absolute monopoly on information to control us; they thrive on our descent into the relativism of truth. By embracing the dangerous, paralyzing idea of “my truth versus your truth,” we reduce their objective, brutal injustices into mere matters of opinion. Relativism is the shadow on the cave wall they use to convince us that the boiling water is just a matter of perspective.
The perpetrators exploit our blind tribalism to shield themselves from accountability. We no longer uphold what is morally right and just; instead, we furiously protect our chosen political personalities, regardless of their sins. We have become our oppressors’ own bodyguards, defending the very people turning up the heat simply because they wear our camp’s colors.
Forty years after EDSA, we must remember: People Power was not resilience. It was resistance. It was a refusal to normalize injustice, a refusal to remain silent and a refusal to endure what was clearly wrong.
And now, another urgency confronts us.
Those who stood at EDSA in 1986 are now at the twilight of their lives. Their memory is fading into history. Their stories risk being forgotten, distorted, or reduced to symbols without substance. With them goes not just a story, but a standard: a standard of moral clarity, of courage and of collective action.
If we fail to receive and live this legacy, the loss is not only historical; it is moral. If we allow their stories to die with them, the puppeteers will win. The next generation will be born in chains, lowered into water that is already dangerously hot, phones in hand, falsely believing the warmth is just a comforting bath. They are counting on our collective, dopamine-fueled amnesia so they can keep the stove burning without resistance.
We cannot, however, simply tell a suffering people to drop their screens. The opium of our endless scrolling is a painkiller because the people are in deep, systemic pain. But to jump out of the water, we must cure the disease, not just condemn the painkiller. We must build a material reality that we do not feel the desperate need to escape from.
True solidarity and mission require us to recognize who is tending the fire. It is the deep consciousness and prophetic will to log off, step out of our bubbles, and disturb the peace. We must shatter the relativism, reject the blind partisanship, and stare the uncomfortable truth in the face.
Forty years after EDSA, the call remains:
Not merely to remember, but to discern.
Not merely to endure, but to act.
Not merely to be resilient, but to refuse.
Lahat ng sangkot, dapat managot!
Mga salarin, dapat patalsikin!
Sobra na! Tama na! Ikulong na!
