By Dioscoro A. Nuñez III

Memory is not solid ground. It shifts, blurs at the edges, and betrays the mind. It is delicate, impressionable, and easily erased when neglected.

The story of the EDSA Revolution stands on this fragile terrain.

What unfolded on February 25, 1986, along Epifanio de los Santos Avenue no longer exists as lived experience for many Filipinos. What remains is an inherited, vulnerable, and incomplete recollection. By nature, memory is unstable. It bends with retelling. It yields to louder narratives. It dulls when it is not exercised.

Under the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos Sr., forgetting was enforced and silence carefully cultivated. Fear thrived as many quietly cowered with exhaustion. The EDSA Revolution erupted because memory had not yet faded. People remembered the wanton arrests, the unexplained disappearances, and the stolen freedoms too vividly to remain still. The rise of Corazon Aquino was not a symbol of perfection, but of possibility. It was a collective insistence that memory mattered more than fear.

But memory does not preserve itself.

Remembering requires labor. It demands listening to stories that are inconvenient, uncomfortable, and sometimes painful. It requires teaching history when it is unpopular, correcting falsehoods when they are easier to ignore, and reopening wounds when we are told to move on. The past must be carried, retold, defended, and, at times, wrestled back from the grip of distortion.

Forgetting is effortless. Remembering is not.

History does not repeat itself because memory vanishes overnight. It repeats because memory is slowly neglected. People assume remembrance will endure without care. When effort fades, memory erodes quietly, almost imperceptibly.

Those who forget are doomed to repeat history, not because history is cruel, but because power is patient. It waits for memory to weaken. It waits for people to grow tired of remembering.

To keep EDSA alive is to accept that remembering is a collective responsibility. Anniversaries and shrines can commemorate, but only people can remember. Remembering demands a daily, conscious, and deliberate choice to hold onto uncomfortable truths, even in a time when society is just too eager to bury the past in favor of new narratives.

Memory is fragile.

The ground it stands on is unstable.

That is precisely why remembering the EDSA Revolution is a moral imperative.