Noynoy Aquino on the Spirit of EDSA

Taken in part from the Philippine Star, February 23 2010

Show of force

The Liberal Party said it will have a show of force on Thursday, Feb.25, the culmination of the three-day revolt that ousted the Marcos regime.

“That is the idea of people power. We want to demonstrate it,” LP standard-bearer Sen. Benigno Aquino III said.

Aquino said the rally would be at the Araneta Coliseum at the Araneta Center in Cubao, Quezon City. Aquino said he personally “feels a sense of pride and achievement” during anniversary celebrations of the Edsa revolution because of the role his family, especially his parents, played in helping the country regain democracy.

At a rally in Marilao, Bulacan, Aquino said the first Edsa should remind his rivals he was not just an inheritor of a good name of the country’s two democracy icons – his late mother and father.

“Given my experience, I should know how it is to be oppressed and thus the desire to change the situation,” Aquino said.

Aquino said no one could lecture him about life’s difficulties and claim that he could not understand what the poor and the oppressed were experiencing being the son of a privileged parents.

He related that he was only 12 when his father was arrested and jailed when martial law was declared in 1972 and then visited him at Fort Magsaysay in Nueva Ecija at age 13. He was 16 when his father was sentenced death by musketry and Aquino said at that time, “I felt the absence of justice” but was helpless to do anything. At 23, he said his family came back to the Philippines from exile in the United States to bury their father who was assassinated and at 27, he was wounded in an ambush during one of the coup attempts against his mother.

Aquino said the people must take the coming election as an opportunity to change the system and not be lazy and just “wait for the guava to fall.” He said then President Ferdinand Marcos wished to stay in power forever and he said many chose to fight Marcos as communist insurgents but in the end the people themselves toppled the dictatorship.

He said President Arroyo now seemed to be no different as corruption was so prevalent.

“Are we going to stand up and change the system or just let it be?” he asked the crowd.

“And once God tells me, finish or not finish pass your paper, I can look (at my parents eyes), I will be looking up, not down to be hit on the head, but proud to tell them that I fought, continued their fight and finished it through the help of the people,” Aquino said.

“Let us tell (our opponents and the administration) that we will no longer allow them to rob us of our future, to rob us of our hope. We are here together, hand in hand, to bring Noynoy to Malacanang,” Sen. Manuel Roxas II, Aquino’s running mate, said.

Article taken from:http://www.noynoy.ph/blog/2010/02/22/noynoy-aquino-on-the-spirit-of-edsa/