IN my Nov. 26 column, I described the Trillion Peso March as a valiant attempt at national unity by “getting everyone equally furious at the same crooks at the same time.” Indeed, it succeeded, if success is measured by the volume of our shared rage. But a protest fueled by communal fury still falters when its anger is divided. Our wrath splinters across multiple villains: corrupt political leadership; a bureaucracy that confuses public service with personal enrichment; and private contractors whose construction empires are built on sand, kickbacks, and asphalt priced like gold bullion.

Ambivalence kills momentum. Outrage diluted by caveats — “Sara is not as crooked as BBM” (referring to Vice President Sara Duterte and President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.) — turns a precise target into a foggy abstraction. In that ambiguity, the guilty find room to breathe.

The “accountability and transparency” slogan, while noble, lacks the primal ring of “Marcos resign!” — a chant turbo-charged by the surviving die-hard acolytes of former president Rodrigo Duterte, who have only swapped posters, not philosophies. Their decibel-level enthusiasm masks a dangerous truth: mass mobilization without unity becomes a political demolition derby — Marcos vs. Sara vs. Yellows vs. the Left — and the nation is the vehicle totaled in the crash.

Unless these marches transcend partisanship, they become merely a Texas hold ‘em poker all-in bet with a nothing hand — a bluff in a game where the house always collects the country’s future as its winnings.

History is rarely kind to those who dismiss the seemingly futile. Revolutions begin as murmurs. Crises stalk until they pounce. The question now isn’t if our national frustration erupts into something larger, but how and when it blows.

I see three decisive forces that will shape the immediate future: the masses, the military and the international arena. Together, they will decide whether we cross the “final tipping point,” and together they will lay before us what we Filipinos love most: A smorgasbord of choices that we will pile on our plates and leave uneaten.

The street: Where change begins — or stops?

The Trillion Peso March was a warning shot, a flare fired from a ship taking on water. But a single march is theater; sustained demonstrations are pressure. They must endure long enough to alter the calculations of the one group that truly makes governments tremble: business. While activists talk about principles, capital speaks the only language politicians listen to: profit. When protests make investors sweat and malls empty, when imports stall and dividends shrink, the business sector drops its neutrality faster than a stock market during a coup rumor.

Remember EDSA I and II. It was not merely the priests, students, or cause-oriented groups that tipped the scales. It was people from the middle class marching with car keys in their pockets and mortgages on the line. When that sector shifts allegiance from stability to upheaval, it signals that the cost of the status quo has become intolerable. Street action must, therefore, sustain enough discomfort to reach that crucial threshold. When the middle class moves, regimes fall. This is always the first domino.

Men with guns: The real ‘checks and balances’

Let us not rewrite our fairy tales: EDSA I and II were not purely civilian love letters to democracy. They were military-backed, Western-trained transitions, with Fidel Ramos from West Point and Angelo Reyes from Harvard (“Alternative scenarios: Lessons from Harvard,” Dec. 3, 2025). The Armed Forces, whether we like it or not, remain the arbiters of order when civilian leadership loses legitimacy. But in this current crisis, the officers face a stark questionnaire: Is the civilian government still legitimate? Is the state machinery still functioning? Is public fury still tolerable?

If “yes” remains true, the military stays reluctantly in their barracks, nervous but restrained, cautious but compliant. But when the answers tip to “no,” the Philippines risks replaying the old tragedies of South America, Africa, and the Middle East: coups executed with surgical precision and patriotic cover stories. Western schooling may have once softened the uniforms, but without a steady civilian helm, even Harvard epaulettes cannot guarantee constitutional loyalty.

We must, therefore, shape the narrative, so that the perception of both the masses and the military become one. Once soldiers decide that democracy has collapsed, even temporarily, they will reshuffle the poker deck, so to speak, with cards no one else can hold. Once unleashed, the genie never returns to the bottle. Toothpaste does not reenter the tube. And power, once seized, rarely walks itself back to its cage.

International calculations: When elephants fight, the grass becomes collateral

Filipino transitions have never occurred in a strategic vacuum. EDSA I only concluded when the United States, our ever-ambivalent patron, told the dictator to “cut and cut cleanly.” And he did cut cleanly, and got a free, first-class plane seat not to Paoay, but to Hawaii.

Today, however, the geopolitical terrain is treacherously altered. The United States is helmed by a cognitively impaired president who weaponizes ignorance with pride, and who has — with breathtaking incompetence — surrendered his country’s economic primacy to a quietly encircling China. Donald Trump’s Indo-Pacific grand strategy has mutated into meme diplomacy: tweets as treaties, tantrums as foreign policy.

China watches like a patient creditor awaiting default. It warmly remembers a Philippines once led by a man now facing judgment at The Hague — and his successor-in-waiting, a heartbeat from power, whose inclination toward China defies fiscal logic or national interest. In our domestic turmoil, China sees an opening: influence invited or imposed.

The US will resist any transition that weakens its Indo-Pacific foothold. China will seize any shift that expands its reach. And our military — US-trained at the top, but its edges courted by China — must choose not only between powers, but also between futures. In geopolitics, there are no spectators. Only players — and prizes.

The day after order collapses

The masses may roar. Politicians may wobble. Markets may panic. But the day after any upheaval, peaceful or otherwise, does not belong to the crowds. It belongs to those who can govern, not merely topple. That future hinges on one defining question: will the Philippines march toward reform, or stumble into disorder? The road forks sharply ahead: a negotiated accountability process, painful but peaceful; a constitutional succession, predictable but uninspiring; a military-backed reset, risky but decisive; a geopolitical tug-of-war, where we lose more than sovereignty. For now, the trains still run, though delayed, overpriced, and occasionally underwater. But soon, the question may no longer be who runs them, but whether they run at all. Meantime, we must persist with other Trillion Peso Marches — in Davao, Cebu, the Bangsamoro region — and then again and again — until the preconditions in my Nov. 26 column have come to pass — the incarcerations of six or seven senators; the 15 to 30 House representatives; the Discayas; the Gardiolas and their cartels; and the BGC Boys of the Department of Public Works and Highways — and yes, Martin Romualdez and Zaldy Co for good measure.

And then? History reloads.

Abangan ang kasunod!

IN the late 1980s, at the Harvard Kennedy School, quite a few of our colleagues were veterans of political turbulence from South America, Africa and the Middle East, where governments fall with the regularity of our typhoons — they offered a curriculum far more vivid than anything in our syllabus. Over brown-bag lunches, they conducted blow-by-blow tutorials on how revolutions, coups d’état, putsches and every imaginable extra-constitutional maneuver are actually managed.

And yes, these convulsions do topple regimes. They do install new ones. But beneath the romance and rhetoric lies a brutal constant: the ordinary citizen — Muhammad, Jamil, Ofedie — is almost always the casualty. Revolutions crown victors but bury the nameless. The slogans are noble; the body counts are not.

Rewards for survivors – Harvard’s curious role

Those who survive the upheavals, from either side, rarely go home empty-handed. They collect ambassadorships, appointed to cabinet posts they are barely trained for, receive mansions with Ferraris in the garage as if they were medals of valor. And then, of course, there are those curious cases where former revolutionaries are “sent” to Harvard.

Not as a prize, far from it. But because history has shown a quiet logic: victorious rebels must undergo metamorphosis. A guerrilla commander who once managed platoons in the mountains must now manage ministries, budgets and the machinery of the modern state. That is where Harvard enters — not as an ivory tower, but as a diplomatic laundromat. Harvard teaches the grammar of statecraft: public finance, diplomacy, negotiation, governance, and pairing the correct wine with the right food, etc.

It is also part of the post-conflict ritual favored by Western and multilateral agencies. They prefer their new partners housebroken, credentialed, and able to pronounce “macroeconomic restructuring” without blinking — and eat at McDonalds without the rice. A year at the Kennedy School transforms insurgents into policymakers with global rolodexes and stylish double-breasted blue blazers. Harvard gets prestige; the revolutionaries get legitimacy. Everyone gets a photo-op.

Why we landed in Cambridge

But in my case and Alex “Babes” Flores’ — I have long suspected a more local logic. Sending us to Harvard was less about polishing our skills and more about temporarily exiling potential political rivals. After all, my last government assignment before grad-school was that of Minister Aquilino “Nene” Pimentel Jr.’s deputy minister replacing Marcos holdovers with hastily appointed OICs, some of whom were more enthusiastic than competent.

What better way to neutralize a politically inconvenient reformer than to ship him off to Cambridge, Massachusetts, a fellowship, a year’s stipend, the seductive illusion of meritocracy and bragging rights! And Babes may have stepped into the toes of several generals. A bemedaled colonel and a loyal participant in the winning side of EDSA I, we absorbed our lunchtime revolution seminars with missionary zeal. Alex would often declare — without irony — that if destiny required, he now knew exactly how to apply the arcana of regime change. Yet even in these spirited discussions, one haunting question etched itself into our collective consciousness: If you overthrow a regime and succeed - who runs the trains the morning after? That question separated dreamy revolutionaries from actual nation-builders. And should we fail this time, there’s always Primo Arambulo — our bow-tied, cigar-puffing Fil-Am contemporary, equal parts martinet and polymath, offering exile bed-spaces in his Maryland manor like a benevolent landlord of lost patriots.

When power meets the real world: cautionary tales

Our Cambridge experiences were not academic abstractions. They were foreshadowings. One fellow student — a charismatic politician from Ecuador — returned home, ascended to the presidency, then was promptly incarcerated for anomalies. Last we heard, he was exiled back to America, his presidency reduced to a cautionary footnote.

Another peer, an Islamic governor from Kaduna state in Nigeria, lived his Harvard years in polygamous splendor, each of his wives equipped with a BMW in the Peabody Terrace parking lot. On weekends he would jet off to London to play polo with Prince (now King) Charles.

These classmates were strictly nonrevolutionaries, yet their trajectories eerily mirror the beneficiaries of our present-day flood control corruption — men who have not yet endured a revolution but already behaving like survivors of one. Comfortable in their villas in Portugal, Paris and Forbes Park, they lounge as if the country’s suffering were events between chukkers or a Superbowl intermission.

Precondition to a PH upheaval

Which brings us to this week’s “trillion-peso march” and the question capturing our national imagination: Quo vadis, Filipinas? At the very least, such a mobilization should spark the swift jailing of senators, congressmen, bureaucrats, and the contractors who masterminded this grand heist — as a crucial build-up towards the tipping point.

In a country where the legal path to a China-style remedy — swift execution — or the North Korean custom of jailing relatives to the second degree of consanguinity is unavailable, the next best option is full restitution. Every peso stolen, every kilometer of asphalt overpriced, every Birkin and Gucci bag bought with public funds, every Rolex and Patek Philippe flaunted as trophies of impunity, the Gulfstream 350 and yes — because symbols matter — the Paraiba Tourmaline ring. All must be returned to the plundered nation.

These prescriptions are not academic indulgences. They arise from lived experience — from the hard lessons Babes, Primo and I absorbed at Harvard, listening to men and women who watched their countries implode and claw their way back. From them we learned a simple truth: Toppling a regime is easy; governing a nation is the real revolution. And regardless of how loud the streets become, the trains must still run the morning after.

The alternatives

The pathways ahead — constitutional, extra-constitutional, violent, nonviolent, reformist, dystopian, or merely farcical — will be dissected in my coming columns. Yet whatever form transition takes, any credible national program must contain one nonnegotiable proviso: systemic reforms. Not the cosmetic tinkering Congress peddles, but real structural correction — the very demands citizens have raised long before legislators perverted the process to protect themselves.

Foremost among these is the passage of a genuine anti-political dynasty law, not the pantomime version that conveniently exempts its authors. Equally vital is revising the 1987 Constitution, trading our dysfunctional unitary-presidential system for a parliamentary-federal model where accountability is unambiguous, incompetence rejected, and authority acquired by merit, not heredity — with dynasts firmly prohibited from steering the overhaul itself.

Only after the plebiscite’s ratification can Marcos and Sara depart — toward imprisonment or exile, at the people’s pleasure — carrying a sliver of dignity for having midwifed, by design or sheer accident, a more coherent constitutional order. And not before then! Nations do not rise because they shout the loudest, but because they choose the hard path when cowardice is easier. The trillion-peso march may ignite a reckoning, but reckoning alone does not shape destiny. Destiny is forged when a people, betrayed too often, finally decide that this time the thieves will not write the ending.

In the end, the question is no longer who falls, but who dares run the trains after the wreckage and who has the courage to rebuild a nation worthy of their arrival.