SEN. GREGORIO Honasan called on Artlets, especially History majors, to provide the next generation of Filipinos a “proper sense of history” in order to produce “better” leaders in the future.
“You (Artlets) will play a very crucial part in giving the next generation, and your generation as well, the proper sense of history so we wouldn’t make the same mistakes [that led to the EDSA Revolution],” Honasan said in the lecture titled EDSA People Power: Telling the Other Side of the Story held Feb. 14.
Honasan claimed that the media and the internet have the tendency to alter historical facts, which makes people not know what to believe anymore.
“Check your sources, and then write history,” he said. “Citizenship is a responsibility [and] if you do not exercise that responsibility, you do not matter. Dapat hindi ka bumoto, wala kang pakialam eh. [Kaya] makialam kayo.”
“The choices that will [allow you] to lead, that is what history, that is what politics, that’s how democracy is all about—making the right choices based on concrete, accurate, and timely information which includes history,” he added.
Years after the movement that ousted former president Ferdinand Marcos, Sr., there were only minimal changes in the country’s system of government, the senator, who took part in a mutiny against the late Marcos, also claimed.
“’Yung sistema that devised the engineering and needed fundamental changes, nanatili. And proof of that is […] noong inulit ba naman natin [‘yung] EDSA II. So tao lang ang pinapalitan, pero ang sistema hindi nababago,” Honasan said.
EDSA People Power Revolutions were held in 1986 and 2001, respectively. The country will celebrate the 31st anniversary of the first EDSA People Power Revolution on Feb. 25.
The forum served as the fifth leg of the KaSAYSAYan Lectures organized by the UST History Society and the UST History Society Commission on Elections. F – ANGELIQUE ANNE F. TORRES
