It must be a surreal kind of Monday when your office desk presents you with a formal request to study the exact moment your family was evicted from that very same building.
For the first time ever, we can actually relate to PBBM because he’s out here doing the most relatable student move: cramming. It’s literally just a day before the 40th anniversary of the EDSA Revolution and he’s now only just starting to “study” the bill that decides if we even get the day off.
I wonder if he needs a highlighter or a therapist to get through House Bill 7911 considering it literally asks him to codify the ouster of his own father into a regular national holiday.
The funny part about this is that BBM has to analyze a document that describes his father’s 21-year reign as an authoritarian regime while sitting in the very office that was reclaimed by the people in 1986.
We’ve all been there, staring at a massive reading assignment the night before it’s due, but usually our homework doesn't involve confirming that our parents were the villains of the story.
Undersecretary Claire Castro is out here telling us they just need to see the different “versions” of the bill, as if there’s a version of history where the revolution was just a massive, uncoordinated street party.
This so-called “studying” is the ultimate political snooze button, a way to acknowledge the paperwork without actually acknowledging the heavy emotional baggage that comes with the 1986 timeline.
It’s not really just about day-offs or having no classes. The weight of House Bill 7911 is that it explicitly states the revolution toppled the authoritarian regime and restored democracy, which is a lot for anyone to digest on a Tuesday.
For a couple of years now, February 25 has been treated like a ghost employee on the national calendar, sidelined by Proclamation No. 1006 which downgraded it to a “special working day.”
The administration’s logic is that businessmen get grumpy about the extra labor costs of a regular holiday which conveniently doubles as a shield to avoid celebrating the day the Marcos era originally ended.
When you look at the holiday economics defense, it’s basically saying that a long weekend for the beach is more practical for the nation than a day of reflection on how we got our current constitution.
But now this bill is forcing a real confrontation with the 1987 Constitution’s spirit, making him decide if he’s going to sign a law that validates the very event that exiledhis family to Hawaii.
It’s a bizarre conflict of interest because, as the sitting President, he is the chief executor of a government that exists precisely because the government of his father was dissolved.
It’s the ultimate history lesson where the student, the teacher, and the guy being graded on the exam are all named Ferdinand Marcos, which makes for a very awkward parent-teacher conference.
So dear President, you may study the paperwork until the ink fades but you can’t exactly delete a memory that an entire nation has saved in its collective cloud, no matter how much you cram at the last minute.
