Every time, you think twice, but I think you have no choice. I have fought all my life. I fought the Marcos dictatorship. I did it for my children. I now have a grandchild, and I cannot imagine my grandchild being raised where I could not let him listen to the president, not being able to look up to the president, that I could not tell him to respect the president for his views.
I think there is no choice. I have chosen. I have stood. At the age of 70, I climbed again onto the truck to make a speech and call the president a coward, because if you don't do it, then who will do it? We have just invested so much in the democratic project, and we thought we were winning it, that we cannot.... I could not now....
I think that is why the grey power in the Philippines is now coming out. It's because to give up now would be a repudiation of what we have spent our lives for. As someone had said, who is now a widow, if she was fearless before, she is even more so now because she has fewer years in her life now. We have more people on the other side of life, so we have to do it.
I think our effort, of course, is that we are able to touch and make the connection with the younger generation, learn to speak each other's language, because the reality is that we don't. The millennials don't, and that has been one of the challenges and certainly one of the most rewarding things that the younger women are now claiming feminism again and are saying, yes, they value the same values but they will fight it their way. That's fine. Some of our creative actions recently were designed by them, and it was good. It was refreshing. We go and stand out, and it is good that we can work with our young women who have more creative ideas about how to do street action. We don't do the rituals, just the old rituals anymore when we go onstage, when we do our rallies. That is one of the things that we continue to do.
It is a question that we ask. How can you face yourself in the mirror in the morning? How do you explain yourself to your child or your grandchild that you let that go? That is a major question that we are asking. What will the future generations ask of us? What did we do during this dark time? For whatever it's worth, I would like to be able to say I did my part.