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Re-Entering the Dark
On finding my way through grief in a dark political time
I’m deep in grief. My country, the Philippines, has elected as president the unapologetic heir of a murderous and plundering dictator we’d ousted in a dramatic show of people power almost 40 years ago.
Months prior to election day, many of us turned to the streets again and again in a similar show of people power. This time, not to oust a dictator, but to voluntarily, passionately, even desperately campaign for an opposition candidate. We were rooting for our outgoing vice president Leni Robredo to beat the dictator’s son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., at the polls, like she did six years ago in a very closely fought vice presidential race. She’d bested him by a mere couple of hundred votes; we were hoping for a similar miracle this time around, and maybe an even wider margin to indicate a turning tide, or a major sway from where we were dangerously heading since Rodrigo Duterte, another strongman, became president.
Marcos Jr., however, had something that Robredo didn’t: the resolve to sanitize the family image, and the stolen wealth to finance it. It didn’t surprise us when Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Brittany Kaiser revealed that Marcos Jr. had sought the services of the company. But what did surprise us, in 2022, was how deeply covert historical revisionism (or…
