BERSALES
Thousands more people went to Luneta to rally behind Pres. Rodrigo Duterte than at the Edsa Shrine — and for two days at that!
I managed to watch painfully as my dear old favorite singer, Jim Paredes, blustered his way to a bunch of youthful Duterte supporters brave enough to insist that they too had a right to be at the Edsa Shrine, with cameras actively recording two versions of looking at the spirit of Edsa: the failed revolution and the promise of another one from a frighteningly gung-ho president.
Some say dear old Jim was drunk. I do not agree. He was frustrated, nay, disappointed at what the spirit of Edsa had become: gone, pffft, in barely a generation — the spirit was but a wandering ghost who had lost its master. Would you not be as frustrated seeing how a non-elite, quick-to-cuss, promdi president now sits in Malacañang and one who even hints at the very notion that brought about the Edsa Revolution?
Meanwhile, because six long years were wasted by the people who should have forwarded the spirit of Edsa, the crowded domestic and international airports in Manila still function on a single runway. And I’m just talking about the airport. We can add the mass transit trains and the cellular networks and many more!
No one thought of adding one runway in the six years of the Aquino presidency. And so, well nigh into a year of the Duterte presidency, a day after Edsa, we waited for an hour to get out of the boarding gates as one of so many delayed Philippine Airlines flights had unloaded its passengers. The delay had started when the plane left Manila an hour late and so it snowballed on its route and return flight.
And so there we stood for about 15 minutes as the boarding gates were suddenly closed while a tenth of our fellow passengers had already reached our plane.
Meanwhile, we heard over the public address system that meals were offered for free to another bunch of passengers who were supposed to be in Bacolod by 6 p.m. but were still in Manila at 10 p.m.
Our ordeal was not over — far from it! Once inside the airplane we had to wait another half-hour for our turn to fly. It was now near midnight. We were supposed to be back in Cebu by 11:30 pm. In the end, we landed at 12:45 a.m.
But we were lucky, just an hour or so of delay. I know of others whose plane sat on the tarmac for more than an hour, after waiting three more hours on the terminal for their flight to begin boarding.
Now, would you blame anyone on board our flight who thought that the promise of Edsa has remained what it is, just a mere promise?