Who among those who participated could ever forget the noise barrage, the public outburst against the Marcos dictatorship, in 1978?

Well, it felt for me like some kind of overdue release of emotions that could not be expressed in words but through trumpets, whistles, car horns, and pots and pans and anything else that could be beaten for noise. Noise was made by families on the sidewalks and streets outside their homes and by motorists from cars on the road forming impromptu caravans.

Oh, the freedom and joy to be taking part in it all, what affirmation of comradeship sounded by a conductor-less national orchestra, playing a deafening cacophony of sounds of righteous rage and frustration and patriotism that beat anything by a philharmonic for personal fulfillment.

That noisemaking came after seven years of silence and, it was to take another seven years to build on it for freedom to be finally regained from the monster of martial law, but it all came to that.

Back with a vengeance

Still, we evidently didn’t do a thorough job. We didn’t deal decisively with the monster’s and his cronies’ eggs. In fact, we allowed them not only to come back but do so with a vengeance, thanks to a copycat worshipper of the old dictator and his own cronies and enforcers. About the only thing new and worrisomely reinforcing is the Chinese factor, a political patron come from across the seas to prop him in perpetual power.

On July 10, an integral part of the master plan was accomplished: the shutdown of ABS-CBN, the nation’s largest and widest-reaching broadcast network, by Congress, which denied its request for a franchise renewal. With that came the gloating declaration from the copycat that he had destroyed the oligarchs without having to declare martial law.

The next day a call went out for a noise barrage, at 7 p.m. of the same day. After watching 13 days of tortuous hearings into the ABS-CBN case—which my husband so aptly called “the theater of the absurd”—the call for noise, if more reflexive than strategic, seemed to us a perfect manner of protest—especially considering the pandemic.

We got into the car and told our driver to drive up and down Ayala Avenue and a little farther out, making as much noise, with car horn, whistles, and a suitable app downloaded into our cell phones, as we could as we cruised along.

Alas, one noisy car does not a noise barrage or motorcade make. People must have mistaken our outing as a desperate emergency trip to a hospital. We were consoled to learn later that around the ABS-CBN compound a more proper staging did materialize.

Same challenges

For July 13, a mere three days afterward, still with scant time to prepare, I passed around a text for another effort. The turnout was far from legion, but it made for a proper-enough caravan, indeed, all things considered, an impressive one.

For an hour from 3:30 p.m.—police said that was enough and dispersed the protest vehicles—the caravan went around and around Ayala Triangle, on the three streets bounding it, in an almost unbroken circle.

Most cars had their windows down and were tooting their horns to the beat of the old slogan “Makibaka, huwag matakot,” passengers’ hands thrust out in a fist or thumb and forefinger forming the L reminiscent of the laban—fight—sign of ’78. Along the way, pedestrians, bikers and passengers of other vehicles expressed their comradeship in the same fashion.

Admittedly, it was still a far cry from April 1978, itself still a long way from the Edsa revolution of 1986. I was then only 46, and had gone through my own personal revolution, starting a new life and feeling—again—that the world was my oyster.

Today, we face the same challenges to our democratic way of life, but the risks are made greater for us by our own natural vulnerabilities—for one thing, we are 34 years older, a definite liability in these pandemic times. Vergel and I do keep in mind that unalterable, in fact progressive, fact.

But we’re not sitting on our behinds while we still can walk unaided, itself tantamount to a dereliction of duty. We will, when the time is right again, stand there to be counted so long as our feet can support us.

Today, for all we know, we could be the noisy majority, but, unless we go out and make ourselves heard, we won’t know. Surely more noise barrages are coming.

From wherever you are, add your own noise. Let us all be heard!