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!