Stubborn reckonings

Watching Katski Flores’ EdJop in a dimly lit cinema, you are struck less by the myth of Edgar Jopson than by the heavy, stubborn cost of inherited memory. In the film, his daughter Joyette – an accomplished triathlete – plunges into frigid waters and jogs across arctic snow, literally running through extremes to process an inheritance she spent years sidestepping. Her mother Joy, whose memories are fading into dementia, lived through losing two underground leaders: first EdJop, shot dead in Davao in 1982 at age 34, and later Romulo Kintanar. Her life alone deserves its own cinematic canvas, but what lingers is Joyette’s realization that reckoning with a parent’s defiance isn’t an act of hero worship. It is a relay.

Outside the theater, that baton is still rolling across the asphalt.

Fifty-four years after Ferdinand Marcos Sr. placed the country under military rule, and exactly one year after the Trillion-Peso March, around a thousand students walked from La Salle Greenhills to the EDSA Shrine on Sunday under the banner “Never Forget: Hindi Mababahà ang Katotohanan.” They were railing against an ongoing flood-control corruption scandal, entrenched dynastic plunder, and budget kickbacks.

It is exhausting to witness how cyclical Philippine rage remains. Half a century ago, EdJop – a moderate Atenean student council president from an affluent grocer family – dared to demand that the elder Marcos pledge in writing not to seek a third term. Today, another generation of twenty-somethings stands under the smog of Ortigas demanding that Congress finally pass an anti-political dynasty law, following the Supreme Court’s reminder of their constitutional duty.

Dynasties now choke over 70% of legislative seats in the country, concentrating both public coffers and policy within family fiefdoms. When multi-billion solar ventures, anomalous insertions, and ghost municipal dikes surface while monsoon rains swamp informal settlements, it isn’t mere policy failure. It is organized extraction. Public debt has ballooned beyond PHP 15 trillion, yet citizens are left paddling through murky floodwaters while billions allocated for drainage evaporate into private bank accounts.

The students are right to reject sanitized performative justice. Investigating budget insertions linked to Zaldy Co, probing anomalous deals involving the Legarda-Leviste solar projects or Alan Peter Cayetano’s Taguig turf, and demanding the Senate impeachment conviction of Sara Duterte are not partisan vendettas – they are the bare minimum requirements of a functioning republic. Nor can the current occupant of Malacañang use anti-corruption crusades as a political deodorizer to scrub historical plunder.

The easy temptation is cynicism – to look at the EDSA Shrine, then at the movie screen, and conclude that the country is simply running on a broken treadmill where the names shift but the impunity endures.

It isn’t a treadmill, though. It’s Joyette Jopson’s grueling, uphill marathon. Democratic ground is neither won permanently nor surrendered quietly; it is contested, mile by agonizing mile, by whoever refuses to drop the baton.