The songs are the same, although the chorus has become the loudest it has been in years. Remember what happened, say the gentlemen of the old guard. Remember what we fought for, say the plump revolutionaries. The commentators wonder if today’s youth understand what Edsa was, admit that the new generations seem to care little about the revolution that their fathers risked their lives for, shake their heads at horror stories of iPod-toting teenagers who look blank-eyed at the mention of an assassination on an old tarmac. Remember Edsa, they say.

I don’t remember Edsa. None of us do. I’ll tell you how it was for most of us, especially for the lucky ones, whose parents and grandparents could say that once upon a time, they stood against a dragon. My first memory is a picture from a book my grandfather left me, the image of a frail old man standing before a tank. Someone in the picture was holding up the Virgin Mary, someone else had a fist to the air. They called it the greatest democracy ever told. Understand that the story is an old story, of a cruel king who loses to the fearless hero. And so the bad king flees, the hero takes the throne, and the forces of good once again prove to all that the truest weapon is the pure heart. This is the story I understood, only it was better than Disney, because the characters were alive, were still heroes, were still forging ahead in the name of God and country. Joker Arroyo storming the courts. Cardinal Sin shouting a call to arms. Gringo Honasan standing his ground. The crowds singing, as confetti rained and a woman named Cory promised an end to cruelty and deceit.

This was the Edsa I grew up with, told by the country I was born to. Two parts magic and one part myth, peopled by giants, all thunder and power and bright yellow hope. That the heroes would fall was only a question of time, because they were only people, but it took a very long time for me to accept it. So Joker sold his soul and abandoned human rights to the President’s butcher. So Cardinal Sin accepted gambling money from the same sinners he condemned. So Ramos bought his Expo Filipino, so the brave Honasan turned tail and ran after the police appeared at his door. They were not the protagonists of my story, the same story I told myself whenever the country found itself at the bottom of another list of Asian nations. It took the massacre at the Cojuanco-run Hacienda Luisita to end the fairy tale, and the testimony of a farmer with gnarled hands, whose son bled to death from a bullet wound sustained on Corazon Cojuangco Aquino’s farmlands.

Remember Edsa, say the heroes. I don’t know what to remember. I can only tell the story that I know. I can’t speak for my generation, although I suspect many of us harbor the same intangible disappointment after a childhood when pride meant a revolution fought on a highway. In 2002, in the heady days of Joseph Estrada’s failed impeachment, it was still the stuff of legend, Loren Legarda and her tears, Joker Arroyo walking out in outrage, my 16-year-old self at home, begging to be allowed “to fight too.” Instead Estrada was hauled out of Malacañang in a charge led by the heroes of Edsa, to be replaced by the much applauded woman whose hand allowed torture and murder and the wholesale savaging of every decent truth. When I think about it now, I understand why the people who marched in 1986 were called freedom fighters, and why, in spite of vigorous and indignant denial on the part of the Republic of the Philippines, the Edsa II crowd was called a mob.

I don’t know what it means to remember Edsa. The Edsa I saw in 2001 was an easy victory, a far cry from the wide-eyed panic on the faces in the shaky footage from February 1986. And maybe the difference is there, not in the composition of the crowds or the difference in generations, but in the fact that the revolution in Edsa began 14 years before Imelda Marcos was forced to leave her high heels scattered on the Palace carpet, began in 1972 when the lawyers and the activists and the poets began to speak against a president whose New Society was also called martial law. 1986 was the prize, fought for by the Aquinos and the Saguisags and Tañadas and a boy named Lean Alejandro and the many nameless who died fighting before 1986. There was no legend behind them, no myth of a four-day quick-fix, only years of unsure outcomes and variable right and wrong. Even today, Bongbong Marcos, senator of the republic, has the gall to say that his father was a hero victimized by bad PR, and on the same week Ferdinand Marcos’ victims are awarded compensation for suffering under his rule.

I’ll tell you what Edsa is for me, for someone who was never there and is still grateful to have lived under the weight of its shadow. For me it’s no longer about good or evil or the sound of helicopters with waving white flags. It’s about accepting that the worst is possible and still standing, about knowing that soldiers on tanks care nothing for wreathes of flowers, and the awareness that sometimes, even great men are still only men. Mostly, it’s about the tedious marching, every day, year after year, asking the same questions and fighting the same fights, even as a new hero comes and offers to carry the sword.

I write this for myself and for the children born 25 years ago to a free country. I do not remember Edsa, but neither will I forget.

I have learned, first, that a man accused of torture, perjury, and the wholesale murder of dozens—by no less than the Supreme Court and the United Nations—is precisely the sort of man fit to sit in the House of Representatives.

Irrelevant, for example, of the testimonies of escaped political prisoners Oscar Leuterio and Raymond Manalo—whose flight to the witness stand led to the 2008 decision of the Supreme Court that Palparan was responsible for the disappearances and subsequent rape of University of the Philippines students Sherlyn Cadapan and Karen Empeño—and in spite of the fact that a commission established to look into the rash of political disappearances recommended the investigation of the Honorable Jovito Palparan, the Commission on Elections permitted the party-list group Bantay—also known as True Marcos Loyalists—to represent the “marginalized and underrepresented sector” of the military in Congress “to implement the government’s national security program.” It was permitted with knowledge that the military has never been more represented in government since martial law, with the administration actively distributing plum leadership positions to retired military men, and with the certain conviction that the group will be led by the gentleman lovingly called “Butcher” by his men.

No matter the protests, the reams of investigative reports, the witnesses, the small girl named Sugar who lost her daddy, Palparan’s inclusion into the House of Representatives establishes that “Butchers”—for as long as they have friends—are not only exempted from the rule of law, they are ushered into Congress and are called “honorable.”

I’ll tell what else I learned, this time from the behavior of the police over the death of ABS-CBN anchor Ted Failon’s wife. I have learned that it is unnecessary to have a warrant of arrest if there are enough members of the police to physically cart away whoever they consider a suspect. I have also learned that it is acceptable for police chiefs to feed false information to journalists to report to the public in order to establish that a man is guilty of killing his wife—as was in the case of Police Superintendent Franklin Moises Mabanag in telling members of the Philippine media that Ted Failon was found with scratches on his person (to indicate a fight with his wife) and that there is evidence her body was moved from his car to the bathroom. It is also appropriate, above all, to drag possible witnesses from the deathbeds of relatives if the cause is justice.

I’ll tell you the last lesson I learned, from the decision of the ladies of the Court of Appeals in their decision in favor of Lance Corporal Daniel Smith over the young woman we now know as “Nicole.” I have learned that rape is only rape if the woman is a “demure provinciana lass.” If she has, in fact, engaged in “undecorous behavior,” which may include going away for a weekend “to enjoy” with two American friends, and accepting free hotel accommodations after knowing them for the shamefully short period of “only about three months,” that woman could not have possibly been raped. And if she did protest, it is only a sudden guilt over her behavior, not because she was actually raped.

I have also discovered, from the learned ladies of the Court of Appeals that a girl cannot possibly be too drunk too refuse sexual intercourse when “she danced non-stop to the urgent beat of rock and hip-hop music” for a total of 15 minutes “without stumbling clumsily on the floor.” The court of course referred to a previously unreferred-to nugget of previous jurisprudence. It is a known fact that “when a woman is drunk, she can hardly rise, much more stand up and dance, or she would just drop. This is a common experience among Filipino girls.”

And because of all this, it is logical to conclude that any vaginal contusions a young woman may have acquired consistent with rape are in all probability not due to rape but may in fact be due to “finger grabs.” It is an important lesson to learn at this time, and one that every young Filipino woman should learn—that if one is raped, one must not speak of it unless one is truly a “demure provinciana lass,” and one must not claim to have been drunk and taken advantage of if she has succumbed to the “urgent beat” of hip hop and rock and roll more than 14 minutes. I am not certain how this jurisprudence applies for reggae or house music, and will assume that R & B is an exception, because the beat is not urgent enough for a drunken girl to fail swaying along to without dropping to the ground.

And so I express my gratitude to the men and women who determine law and order in this country. On the off chance I am raped, disappeared, or invited for questioning, I am glad to know I and the rest of my generation will be in good hands.