People Power Revolution at 40: The unfinished crossing

FORTY years ago, along a stretch of highway now permanently etched into our national vocabulary, history was written into the cracks of a road perpetually busy yet connecting the entire metro.

- JARED ECHEVARRIA

It was here that the nation paused, pivoted, and found its turning point.What the world would later call the People Power Revolution was not merely a three-day spectacle of rosaries and raised fists. It was the culmination of 14 years of authoritarian rule under Ferdinand Marcos, years marked by censorship, arrests, disappearances, and an economy brought to its knees.

I write this as someone born five years after EDSA, in a time when being Filipino was once a source of global admiration, when our peaceful uprising became a template for democratic transitions from Poland to South Africa. For a moment in 1986, the Filipino was not defined by export labor or remittance figures, but by civic courage.

Though I was not born in that era, the memories of those who were, the testimonies of those who witnessed, and the stories passed down through understanding have etched themselves into my consciousness. I recall the courage, the fear, the devotion, as if I had been there myself, standing shoulder to shoulder with strangers, clutching rosaries, facing tanks on that road of reckoning. Though my participation is secondhand, the details live vividly in my mind, and in some strange way, I carry the weight and resolve of that generation as if it were my own.