EDSA at 40: Why Senators Call It ‘Unfinished Business’

Four decades later, the revolution’s heroes get their due — and a pointed reminder.

Forty years ago this week, millions of Filipinos stood on a highway and toppled a dictator without firing a shot. Today, their children and grandchildren are being asked a harder question: Did we finish what they started?

When a Revolution Becomes a Memorial

The 40th anniversary of the EDSA People Power Revolution is unfolding as both celebration and reckoning. Rappler’s live coverage shows commemorations honoring the men and women who faced down tanks with rosaries and flowers in February 1986. These weren’t abstractions. They were teachers, drivers, nuns, students, and housewives who decided that four days on hot asphalt mattered more than twenty years of silence under Ferdinand Marcos Sr.

The tributes are specific this year. Names are being spoken aloud. Stories are being archived. There’s an urgency to the remembering — the kind that surfaces when a generation realizes its witnesses won’t be around forever. The revolution’s heroes are aging. Some have passed. What remains is the question every revolution leaves behind: What do we owe them?

The Senate’s Uncomfortable Truth

Philippine senators aren’t letting the anniversary pass with generic praise. They’re calling EDSA what it is: unfinished. That word carries weight. It means the work of 1986 — dismantling authoritarian structures, building genuine democratic institutions, ensuring that power truly rests with the people — remains incomplete. It’s a diagnosis, not an insult.

Why does this matter now? Because the son of the ousted dictator currently sits in Malacañang. Because the machinery of historical revisionism has spent years online rewriting what happened, turning a dictatorship into a golden age and a people’s uprising into a CIA plot. Because younger Filipinos, born long after tanks rolled down EDSA, are inheriting a version of history that competes with the truth their parents lived.

The senators’ framing is deliberate. Calling EDSA unfinished is a way of saying: the fight didn’t end in 1986. Democratic backsliding isn’t theoretical. It happens when citizens forget that freedom isn’t a trophy you win once and place on a shelf. It’s a muscle. Use it or lose it.

What This Means for Your Vote

If you’re reading this, you likely weren’t on EDSA in 1986. Maybe your parents were. Maybe your lola. Maybe no one in your family was there at all, because they were in the provinces, or already abroad, watching it unfold on grainy TV screens in Riyadh or Los Angeles.

Here’s what the “unfinished” label means in practical terms: the freedoms you assume — to criticize the government without disappearing, to vote without violence, to read news that isn’t state propaganda — were earned forty years ago, but they’re not permanent. They require maintenance. When senators warn that EDSA is unfinished, they’re not being nostalgic. They’re saying the institutions that protect those freedoms are still fragile.

For OFWs especially, this hits differently. You left to build a better life, often because the system at home couldn’t provide one. The corruption, the patronage politics, the dynasties — these are the things EDSA was supposed to dismantle. That they persist is proof the revolution stalled. Your remittances keep families afloat, but they also mask the structural failures that EDSA was meant to fix. Every balikbayan box is a reminder: we shouldn’t have to leave home to survive.

For those in the Philippines, the question is sharper: What are you willing to protect? Not with tanks or barricades, but with attention. With votes. With the refusal to let history be rewritten in real time on your feeds.

Editor’s Take

Forty years is long enough to romanticize a revolution or forget why it happened. EDSA wasn’t magic. It was millions of people deciding that enough was enough, and that decision cost something — careers, safety, certainty. Calling it unfinished isn’t pessimism. It’s honesty. The democratic space Filipinos won in 1986 is still contested, still vulnerable, still worth defending. Revolutions don’t stay won by themselves. They stay won because people remember what it took to win them — and decide, every day, that the fight still matters.

The heroes of EDSA didn’t finish the work because no revolution ever does in four days.

Sources
LIVE UPDATES: EDSA People Power Revolution 40th anniversary — Rappler
People Power at 40: A memorial for – and a reminder from – the revolution’s heroes — Rappler
‘EDSA is an unfinished revolution’: Senators commemorate People Power — Philippine Star