Thirty-five years later, we strain to find the words and recapture the feelings so we can remember and salute the historic four days of February 1986, when our country and our people ousted the government of President Ferdinand Marcos and forced him to seek exile in Hawaii.

It’s not just the coronavirus pandemic that makes remembering so difficult now. We have experienced more than the dimming of our individual feelings and collective memory. It is also the coarsening of our hearts and the onset of cynicism toward the perfunctory commemoration of dates.