Not that the protesters, mostly the dirt-poor masa, have no right to redress their grievances. They have, in fact, legitimate and more valid reasons in their long-enduring impoverished and unjust conditions to rail against than a perceived mistreatment of their detained idol, deposed president Joseph ‘Erap’ Estrada.

Because Edsa isn't merely a "numbers game," no matter how the habitual liars and deranged sycophants of the deposed president are trying desperately to reduce it to. For sure, that motivation is to be understood of such manner of beings who profess by the dictum that principles can be prostituted and that causes have their corresponding price—something in the amount of P3 billion.

Since Erap’s arrest, the unscrupulous lot has been hoarding poor folks by the busloads, even shiploads, to Edsa to stage their own version of people power. In the guise of defending democracy, they are however fomenting a class war, spreading disinformation and exploiting the event to prop up their sagging political fortunes in the light of the coming elections.

They ought to realize that Edsa is not the bosom from which evil designs and selfish political machinations are nurtured. At Edsa, we freed ourselves first from the tyrannical rule of a dictator and then a Mafia-like presidency, however imperfect the paths we took in their aftermath. The Marcoses and their rapacious and murderous ilk, some of whom continue to run for public office, remain unpunished and unrepentant to make a mockery of what we've fought for in Edsa.

There's no place in Edsa for illegitimate causes that are waged to restore corrupt and bankrupt regimes, specifically one that placed a so-called makamasa president's self-interest over and above the interests of those he vowed to serve. True, eleven million predominantly masa votes catapulted Estrada to the most powerful position in the country. But what he did with that overwhelming mandate was the more relevant issue about his tenure, something that remains unwittingly lost on his rabid followers, yet consciously so among his shameless lawyers and cohorts.

It is just plain deplorable that the poor keep falling for false idols like Estrada, who has shrewdly etched in the masa's collective memory the image of Asiong Salonga, defender of the poor, one of their kind. Never mind that their fallen hero, in real terms, isn’t every bit one of them, one whose life is given to filthy-rich luxuries but who could only provide them a mere pittance—occasional shopping bags of groceries during his birthdays, poorly built excuses for homes, meaningless land titles.

Even more deplorable, they are now being misled again at Edsa by Erap lackeys who are as pseudo-pro-poor as him, all in the name of a return to their thieving, "weather-weather" ways.

Indeed, we may allow Joseph Estrada a little breather from harsh realities. After all, he prefers to dwell in the surreal—in his celluloid world where he is known by his screen name rather than by the one he was baptized with. Seemingly not content with that alias, he has even gone to christening himself other fictitious names like Jose Velarde, Jose Rizalisto and Kelvin Garcia.

The number 11 has formed part of the Devil's insignia. On the night of January 16, the votes of eleven senators sitting supposedly as impartial judges in the impeachment trial of Joseph Estrada aka Jose Velarde ensured that.