“Praise is the shipwreck of historians’’ Lord Acton (Inaugural lecture on The Study of History, Cambridge, June 1895)

This corner joins the Filipino people sincerely extending to the Aquino family, deep condolences particularly in this, their trying hour of grief. Cognizant of President Cory Aquino’s role as housewife, widow, president and stateswoman, she has evolved into – note – one of the nation’s icons of democracy, in the pantheon of our rich national heritage. Of current, with Senator Ninoy Aquino and Salvador “Doy’’ Laurel etc. Citizen Cory remained active in the fulcrum of political struggles, defining pestilential moments by her words and presence in the public eye.

Saddened by her passing, we are courteous of her major contributions to more recent history in the struggle for the restoration of democracy, commencing in 1983 after the assassination of another libertarian martyr in the person of Senator Ninoy Aquino; and anointing “personal candidates’’ detached from the official opposition line-up in the 1984 Parliamentary elections.

As a generation of our fathers are graying, their gait weaker, while others like Cory having moved on into praise, and the unavoidable scrutiny of history, it is just and occasioned to glance over their broad shoulders to honor those who have also sacrificed or gone ahead in what must be an “inclusive history’’ of our republic commencing from the dark days when, according to George Orwell, “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth was a subversive action’’ – e.g. 1978 Laban Campaign; the establishment of the United Nationalist Democratic Organization, despite Martial Law, the UNIDO boycotting a sham “presidential elections’’ early 1981; Ninoy in the tarmac, a fallen warrior of censorship by assassination, 1983; Salvador Laurel resigning as member of Parliament; UNIDO fielding candidates in the 1984 Batasan elections and winning 60 seats; the 1986 snap elections, Cory and Doy running under the UNIDO banner; to the principal roles of Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile and AFP Vice Chief of Staff and Chief PC/INP Fidel Ramos provisioning the coercive faction of what was an active and building volcano for change and reform. Thus, a democratic movement found greater viability and resonance, after the open and armed break by a faction of the AFP/PC/INP. The vital role of the latter expedited what may have been a long asymmetrical political struggle; and the Filipino people, above all else, nameless and faceless, but to whom the greatest ovation belongs too, for the Revolution.

Amidst much emotionalism, rekindled recollections, and of personal, as well, national loss, “exclusive history’’ may be one of the pitfalls in our “yellowed inebriation’’ at these times. True history belongs to all, in a collective celebration not of an individual, but of principals and followers sowing the national fabric from various points, not discounting nor editing the blemishes of heroes, protagonists, kibitzers, mercenaries etc. Miguel de Cervantes of Don Quijote counsels, “For Historians ought to be precise, truthful and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future.’’