Monthly Archives: June 2026

Qwertyman No.204: The Anatomy of a Grievance

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Qwertyman for Monday, June 29, 2026

BARELY HAD we wrapped our heads around what happened to lead to the deaths by drowning of the two Ateneo athletes Rene Baterbonia and Divine Adili when we got the news of a mass shooting at the San Jose National High School in Tacloban, Leyte, with two teenagers allegedly responsible for killing three students and injuring many others.

Both events were met with shock and outrage, as was to be expected. Even in the long catalog of evils and misfortunes that we Filipinos have become familiar with, these did not exist. Healthy, star-quality athletes do not suddenly die; Filipino teenagers tied to their cellphones do not bring guns to school and shoot their peers dead. It was as if we had let new and unfamiliar monsters into our fold, and we were eager—indeed adamant—to give them a face, a name, and a motive. At the very least, we needed someone or something to blame, to ease our consciences. 

That consternation likely accounts for the plethora of suspicions, accusations, and conspiracy theories that emerged in the wake of these tragedies, ostensibly to throw light on “what really happened” but achieving the opposite effect of leading us even farther away from the truth. I myself have been mighty confused by some of these responses—who said exactly what, where did that come from, etc.—that I turned to AI (yes, I know, something that some of us trust even less than the cafeteria Marites) to help me sort things out; in this instance, I used Claude, which has proven to be a reliable assistant in my nonfiction work. (We can have another debate another time about whether writers like me should even resort to AI—at which I’ll ask if you’ve ever used Google or an electronic calculator, for that matter—but I’m hoping that this present discussion will offer proof enough that there’s room for mechanical assistance in human argumentation.)

Most troubling if not ridiculous of all have been a couple of memes I’ve seen claiming that Rene was beaten up and drowned by his fellow players and that the coaches merely looked on. 

These speculations apparently ride on the allegation made by Rene Baterbonia’s mother Rovelyn that her son’s death was no accident—a short step away from claiming that Rene was murdered, as some netizens have chosen to interpret it. But nowhere in her many interviews did Rovelyn clearly and verifiably say that “My son was murdered.” (And neither am I saying that she had no right to claim that had she wanted to, as the most aggrieved party entitled to her darkest fears and suspicions.) 

What the record shows is that, based on what she initially heard, she believed that Rene’s arms and legs had been weighted down (subsequently denied by the autopsy results), and that the dangerous exercise had taken place without informed consent (a continuing issue). She also took Ateneo to task for not communicating with her quickly and clearly enough (I think a fair charge). So no, Mrs. Baterbonia never said nor suggested that someone purposely killed her son. She does allege criminal negligence, which many people suspect, and a sorely inadequate response on Ateneo’s part, which I think even Ateneans admit in their heart of hearts.

What muddled this further was the CIDG’s reported statements, made more than a week after the June 9 incident, that the deaths were “not an accident,” apparently contradicting the local police’s initial assessment. That later statement, made by CIDG Director Robert Morico II on June 17 and repeated on June 18, was hedged as a presumption awaiting further evidence. It ultimately recommended, in its June 26 findings submitted to the Department of Justice, that an anti-hazing case should be filed against 11 individuals led by Coach Tab Baldwin, since the team-building activity constituted hazing under dangerous conditions. But “not an accident” resulting in homicide again doesn’t translate to willful murder—or a plot, as the DDS puts it, for Luzon to kill off Mindanao’s finest. It’s now up to the DOJ to move matters forward.

What this tells me is that in the absence of factual information, clearly and promptly disseminated, all kinds of malicious rumors will emerge and easily find sympathetic receptors and transmitters. (I suspect the counter-narratives would have arisen anyway—the trolls have to earn their keep, which means the fact-checkers and truth-sayers have to work at least as hard.)

The same miasma now threatens to engulf the Tacloban shootings, in which two teenagers carrying a .38 revolver and a Glock 9-mm were involved. The Internet was quick to spit out AI-generated pictures of Sens. Kiko Pangilinan and Risa Hontiveros coddling the two suspects, with Sen. Kiko being blamed for his sponsored law setting the bar for criminal responsibility at age 15 (the UN recommends a minimum of 14 years). 

There are many other aspects to this case, including that of gun ownership, but let’s focus for now on this age-of-criminal-responsibility thing, which Pangilinan’s DDS detractors want to bring down to 10. Again, to be clear, Kiko stated that the law as it stands doesn’t automatically absolve the juvenile shooters from responsibility; they remain accountable in various ways, and cannot simply be released.  

If they used the same AI they used to malign the senators, the DDS propagandists would have discovered that the UK, which does use age 10 as its baseline, has a higher crime rate than other European countries using 14-15. The Nordic countries start at 15 and are among the world’s safest. (North Korea reportedly sets its bar for criminals at 6.)

We seem so eager to establish at what age young offenders can be punished that—as horrendous as the Tacloban shootings were—we forget the far more numerous and grievous crimes committed every day by adults in this country that go unpunished. 

In any case, the most sensible response I’ve read to the Tacloban shootings came from a Facebook poster named Raffy Magno, who said that “There is something deeply troubling about a society that is quick to demand the harshest punishment for young people, while celebrating convicted plunderers, tolerating corruption, and rewarding leaders who normalize violence.

“Young people do not grow up in a vacuum. They learn from the values we model, the behavior we reward, and the systems we build around them. Violence rarely begins at the moment it becomes visible. It is often preceded by bullying, social isolation, neglect, untreated trauma, and countless missed opportunities for intervention.

“If we want children to reject violence, then we must also be willing to examine the ways our society excuses, glorifies, and profits from it. We cannot celebrate violence among adults and expect young people to learn a different lesson.”

The call for justice begins with raw and strong emotion, but ultimately it has to be dispensed with cool and thoughtful reason.

Qwertyman No. 203: Camara v. DENR

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Qwertyman for Monday, June 22, 2026

I WISH I could say that this is a welcome break or a pleasant diversion from the infernal politics rocking the Senate (which thankfully seems to have settled down, at least for the time being, with the miscreants licking their wounds), but it’s neither pleasant nor a diversion, as it reminds us that real problems remain out there that demand both governmental action and civic awareness to resolve.

As an opinion writer, I receive a fair number of messages requesting that I highlight certain issues and causes, and while many are patently trivial and self-serving enough to easily ignore, some pique my interest because of their strategic implications for our future—not even just ours, but our children’s and grandchildren’s.

One of those messages came from Philip Camara—whom I don’t know and have never met, but who introduced himself as a Zambales resident and Executive Director of the Institute of Area Management (IAM). He had served as the DENR Undersecretary for Field Operations under the late Sec. Gina Lopez, before the mining lobby gutted her appointment.

Philip himself may have been out of a job, but he continued his advocacy in private by founding the Zambales-based IAM, an NGO that promotes “areaism,” an alternative community development framework that emphasizes resource management and governance by geographic area than by sector.

This month, Camara and IAM—along with minor Placida Natividad C. Montefalcon and “generations yet unborn”—filed a petition for a Writ of Kalikasan and Continuing Mandamus before the Supreme Court against the DENR and the Mine and Geosciences Bureau (MGB). The petition also asks for a Temporary Environmental Protection Order (TEPO) for immediate interim relief while the case is pending.

What’s the issue? Philip says that “Living in Zambales—where there are highly destructive watershed-based mines and where the political dynasty acts with impunity in its pro-extractive corporate activity—gave me little choice but to take legal action. This action challenges what we call ‘Sectoral Rationality’—the bureaucratic practice of approving mining and dredging projects based on short-term revenue while assigning a value of ZERO to environmental destruction and public health burdens. Backed by hard 2024 and 2025 scientific data from Zambales, our petition argues that this framework is now explicitly illegal under the new PENCAS law (RA 11995), which mandates natural capital accounting.”

In other words, Philip claims that the DENR and MGB have been approving potentially destructive projects without taking their environmental and health impact into account. This runs contrary to the new Philippine Ecosystem and National Capital Accounting System (PENCAS) Act, signed into law in 2024 to factor the environmental costs and benefits of projects into development planning and align the Philippines with international environmental accounting standards. So when you put up a mine, you don’t think about just how much money it’s going to make for the short term, but also what it’s long-term impact on the environment and the community will be.

The “writ of kalikasan” that the petition is praying for is a Philippine legal remedy for environmental protection, based on the constitutional right to “a balanced and healthful ecology” under Article II, Section 16 of the 1987 Constitution. Created by the Supreme Court in 2010, it’s a pioneering remedy that few other countries have. The idea is to give citizens a fast, powerful tool to stop large-scale environmental damage without getting bogged down in ordinary litigation.

The writ has a scale requirement that comes into play when the environmental harm is large enough to “prejudice the life, health, or property of inhabitants in two or more cities or provinces.” It can’t be invoked for local or isolated environmental damage, like a factory polluting your backyard—it has to cross jurisdictional boundaries, which Camara argues is the case in Zambales, where the contamination and erosion produced by mining reaches out toward Pangasinan. 

You don’t even have to be directly affected to be able to file a petition for the writ before the Supreme Court (and yes, such petitions go straight to the SC, bypassing the judicial bureaucracy, in recognition of the writ’s importance). It’s worth noting that the petition is also being made on behalf of “generations yet unborn,” taking a page from the landmark 1990 Oposa v. Factoran case premised on the argument that natural resources such as forests belong not just to the present generation but the future as well. If it agrees, the SC can then compel the respondents (public or private) to stop the damaging activity, protect or rehabilitate the environment, monitor compliance, and submit reports. 

The Camara petition rests on the legal notion that the 1995 Mining Act (RA 7942) requires that mineral exploration be “rational” without actually defining what “rational” means, effectively assigning a value of zero to watershed destruction, shoreline collapse, food contamination, public health damage, and harm to future generations. It cites two scientific studies to back up its claims as to the critical nature of this negligence. A 2024 toxicity study in Sta. Cruz, Zambales found nickel enrichment factors, cancer-risk, and hazard values exceeding international safety thresholds, and contamination reaching local rice crops. A 2025 erosion study in San Felipe, Zambales found dredging within the “Depth of Closure” zone, shoreline retreat of about 16 meters per year, and projected losses of ₱3.88 billion by 2030. 

There are globally adopted scientific methods and measures in place to establish “rationality.” Leaving it vague and undefined—we hope not intentionally—opens doors to misinterpretation, abuse, and corruption. Far worse, it will destroy the future, with the law standing by in complicit silence and virtual approval, if this loophole remains unplugged.

So thank you, Philip Camara, for bringing this to our attention—but more importantly, I hope it reaches sympathetic ears at the Supreme Court, whose favorable judgment can make a tremendous difference for those “generations yet unborn.”

Penman No. 486: The Ghosts of Our Fathers

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Penman for Sunday, June 21, 2026

TALKING ABOUT how memory softens loss in Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes that “He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.” 

As I’ve discovered from my friends and from people I know, father-son relationships are often fraught with conflict and tension, especially from those childhood and growing-up years when emotions are raw and expectations run high. There’s a host of theories to explain the problem—Oedipal competition, the emotional detachment of fathers, bars set too high, among others—but whatever causes the pain, it tends to linger, until we learn to relinquish our grievances to time and age.

I’ve been more fortunate in my experience, but I’ve asked three writer-friends to share theirs, and to embrace the ghosts of our fathers that will stay with us for the rest of our lives.

Butch Dalisay

I’ve often written about my dad, Jose Sr., whom I grew up idolizing not just because he was intelligent, but also because he was very resourceful or maabilidad, as they say. He was well known in Romblon to have been the province’s smartest young man at that time. And he would have gone on to a law degree and a distinguished career by everyone’s reckoning, except that his family was poor. And while my mother was someone who came from a family of means in Romblon, shortly after they married and had me, the first of their five children, the family fell on hard times when he lost his job. 

He worked for the Motor Vehicles Office. He worked for the Department of Public Works and Transportation as a clerk, but there were very difficult periods when my father took on jobs far beneath his competence. He did not think it beneath him to work, for example, as a barker for jeepneys just to put me and my siblings through school with the help of my mom, who was a postal employee.

I hero-worship him despite the fact that he was deeply flawed. He was a gambler, which probably explains why I’m an avid poker player to this day. I could remember the smell of the pancit that would announce a night of winnings, but more often than not, he would come home quiet early in the morning, and I kind of understood what had happened. Once he brought home a brand-new Singer typewriter to encourage the young writer in me, only to have it vanish when he couldn’t keep up with the installments.

It was my father who introduced me to reading and writing. He was an excellent writer himself, and the governor of Romblon relied on him to write his speeches and to become a kind of secretary and recorder for this and that. It was a role that he would play all throughout his life, even in his old age, as a barangay official, someone who would help people in our village in San Mateo with their paperwork. He introduced me to reading because there were many things to read in the house, Time magazine and Reader’s Digest, and soon books. 

He was a gentle, loving man who adored my mom Emy and took good care of us in ways more than money could. My wife Beng and our daughter Demi cherished him. When he died of an aneurysm at age 73 in 1996, I was crushed, and I treasure the times when we meet in my dreams, walking on the shore of our hometown in Romblon. 

I owe him the gift of words, which I am now passing on to others.

Krip Yuson

Armando Sison Yuson came from Lingayen, Pangasinan. He tried to be an Air Force pilot before World War 2, but cut out at some point. His father wrote poems in Spanish and Pangasinense, as I’ve been told by writer-friends from the region. 

I can’t really share much or anything else about my dad, except that we had a falling out when I was 16, after he became too religious and wanted everyone in the family to pray the rosary every day to start the evening. I couldn’t do it after the first few days, and said so. Nothing he said could change my mind. It broke his heart, and he blamed everyone, including himself, for allowing his firstborn to enter UP after graduation from San Beda, proving his fears right that I had joined an atheist university. My doubts about faith actually began a year earlier, and were resolved when I read Robert Green Ingersoll at the UP library: “Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith. Banish me from Eden when you will, but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.”

My dad (called him that because he was an Amboy) and I never became close again. As an early barkadista, I spent more time away from home. He passed away when I was 32. I tried writing a poem on him for almost a year, but gave it up. The following year, 1978, I was on my first week at the International Writing Program in Iowa City when I felt his presence in my Mayflower Apartments room as I was turning in. I recall saying out loud, “Dad, must you follow me here?” 

I couldn’t sleep. A poem started in my head, a triplet of a stanza, immediately followed by another, and another. Before my memory could give out on more lines, I got up and started pounding away on my typewriter. The lines followed until I completed the poem. My first experience of automatic writing. When I checked the page in the morning, I decided there was nothing I had to revise. It became one of my most favorite and most anthologized poems. Here it is, written in 1978. 

Father (from Sea Serpent, 1980)

Must everything begin and end 

with tension, as with father and son,

the memory of games and sins between?

In the hospital I watched your heart

tighten its flutter across a screen, a moth

blipping from breath to breath

and finally arriving at a pinpoint

of dark, the last light a feint

that threw me off your sorry hint.

Entering your deathroom I came

upon a sad peace, bent toward time

And kissed you; you were him.

Pressed your hand and in a wild

appeal to chance thumped a child’s

blow upon your chest, a field

I wanted to revive and roam

upon some more, though the dusk of the dream

hurried me along toward half a home.

Sarge Lacuesta

My father, Amado Lacuesta, Jr. quit his high-profile job at one of the country’s pioneering investment banks to become a full-time screenwriter. I don’t know if it mattered that there were four of us kids and that I was just entering high school. But because of his life decision he showed me a life that was so rare and so special that I
felt privileged to be a part of it. I would tag along to his tapings, his shoots, and his brainstorming sessions as his semi-official sidekick. Never mind that it was a school night or that the discussion—or worse, the proceedings—were not really appropriate for
someone my age.

It’s been almost 30 years since he died of a heart attack at the age of 49. I was 26—so long ago that I don’t really remember many details of him anymore. That’s more years without him than with him, so that is fair. I am also older now than he ever would have been, and there’s a lot of disconnect between who I am now and the son that I was.



But what has rubbed off on me during our years of father-and-sonhood has stayed, for better or for worse. I am overly critical of others and blind to my own faults like he was. I remember him critiquing a writing exercise I performed for him when I was ten or eleven years old, mainly by laughing at my cliches and tired turns of phrase. I am as idealistic and often as detached from reality as he was. At EDSA, he used his own car—the only car we had—to physically block the path of the tanks that were rumored to roll into White Plains Avenue.

Now I am my own father, in every sense of the phrase: I’ve lost a large part of him, but a large part of him I can’t help but carry around.

Charlson Ong

My father Conrado was a rather laidback fellow whom I think would have been more successful in another time and place. As a second-generation Chinoy born and raised in Binondo, he ended up as a business person—and, in my recollection, a rather reluctant one. He was always too trusting of friends and spent on not a few turkeys, like real estate that disappeared after landslides and high tides. I always thought his passion lay elsewhere.

In hindsight he passed on some opportunities that might have led to bigger prospects but I guess he was never the sort who ‘bore into the money hole’ as the Chinese would have it. He perhaps never had the drive or risk taking personality, content to raise a comfortable middle class family—we were three kids, I was the youngest—with vital help from our mother. There never much issue between us, as I was youngest and when I was born in 1960, my parents were more or less settled. I know he worried for me because of my interests but never interfered with my life choices, I feel he regretted not being able to leave behind enough for me to engage my whims without having to worry about livelihood.

He loved cars and, I’d like to think, singing. He was a very good baritone who took lessons in his younger years with an operatic singer. But he had difficulty with the Italian and French lyrics and eventually gave it up. But some Sundays he would sing Chinese ditties while our mom, a piano major, accompanied. In long drives—before the time of car stereos , cartridges,  cassettes, Spotify—during the 1970s and ‘80s, he would sing to himself just to stay wake driving while I pretended to sleep. But the songs embedded themselves into my psyche—romantic ditties of the 1950s and art songs of the 1930s while China waged its war of resistance against Japan and warlords. Whenever requested to sing Chinese songs, I draw on this repertoire of oldies.

He had an innate heart condition we now refer to as “athletes’ heart.” He had a health crisis as a younger man in his 30s but once it passed gave he gave in to his epicurean instincts and a two-pack-a-day smoking habit. By the 1980s he had his first heart attack but there was nothing much the technology of the time could realistically do.

In October 1987 he had his second attack. I was scheduled then for my first trip to China for the premiere of Eddie Romero’s Hari sa Hari—a co-production between the Philippines and China about the Sultan of Sulu and his embassy to the Ming emperor.

I thought my chance to go to China had passed, but my father recovered briefly and sent me on my way—I always felt he wanted me to experience the old country. But shortly after I left he suffered his third attack. This was before the the Internet, so for the week that I was in China I was blissfully unaware that he was fighting for his life. 

When I returned, I had to rush to the hospital and upon arriving, I found out he had just passed away. He was 57. I did not witness his final days, but the lore remains that while he was in and out of lucidity, he had some clear moments, and when our plane landed in Manila he was supposed to have uttered—his tongue had receded by then—that ‘They have alit, my youngest is home.’ Until this day I can never recount that tale without tearing up and I was able to mourn him only through some of my later fiction. Still whenever I am bamboozled to sing, willingly or otherwise, I know that his voice is there.

Qwertyman No. 202: Oh, Ateneo

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Qwertyman for Monday, June 15, 2026

WITH SO much already having been said and posted about last week’s saddest story—the tragic drowning of two Ateneo student-athletes in a training activity far off-campus—it seems pointless to add anything more. But as a former university administrator (with that other big school at the other end of Katipunan Avenue, the University of the Philippines), I feel compelled to think aloud and wonder what we should and could have done had this happened to us across the street.

The Ateneo university administration has been roundly (and I believe fairly) scored for not saying and doing enough in the immediate aftermath of the apparent accident to establish what happened, determine accountabilities, and provide sympathy and support to the bereaved. What drowned in Aurora were more than two boys and their hopes; into the depths went their school’s hard-won reputation for a culture of caring.

Institutional mindsets would reflexively call this “damage control,” but “damage control” sounds profoundly inappropriate and inadequate in these circumstances—the greatest damage done was that to the families of Rene Baterbonia and Divine Adili, and it is permanent and cannot be undone. Even to a people inured by tokhang, the heartrending video of a mother’s grief cuts to the bone.

The damage to the university’s reputation is substantial but, in the thick-skinned way these things go, fleeting and survivable. What people are calling for is justice, and let the damage fall where it may. In an academic universe increasingly driven by global ratings, a university’s reputation should seem to matter more, but where in the statistics do factors like compassion count? 

I know how difficult it is for academic bureaucrats to respond to a crushing crisis like this. My old job at UP, aside from teaching English and creative writing, was that of Vice President for Public Affairs, which meant that I was both the university’s spokesperson and shock absorber, the one who had to face the likes of Ka Tunying at seven in the morning to answer questions about all the rich kids in UP, fraternity hazing, communists on campus, and UP’s squatter problem.

It was understood that I was there to help promote and protect the university’s image, at a time when that image was being battered from both right and left, often from critics at the very top of the same government that we were dependent on for our annual budget. For the sake of that budget—which had its own critics—we had to tread a thin line between cooperating with authority and preserving our autonomy and academic freedom, a process fraught with conflict and, yes, sometimes hypocrisy, as when we had to smile in the face of politicians we would otherwise have cursed. While each little and isolated case may have been challenging and disturbing, eventually they all became administrative routine, necessarily tolerable.

But for every institution, there comes a defining moment when more than budgets or reputations are at stake, when its very spirit itself is under question and under threat. That moment seems to have arrived for Ateneo, a great university unlike many others, even unlike UP, founded as it is on Christian and indeed Ignatian principles that include magis or the striving for excellence for God’s greater glory and cura personalis or caring for the whole person. As Fr. Pedro Arrupe, SJ put it, a Jesuit education aims at producing “men and women for others.” UP has its “Serve the People,” but its secular character imposes less of a spiritual and more of a political mission on its community.

This is why the Ateneo administration’s seeming inadequacy of response to the accident, beyond its terse initial announcement, comes as a perplexing disappointment to many, on top of the awful pain and grief caused by the deaths themselves. In the very least, a statement providing more details of what happened, committing to a thorough and impartial investigation, and offering support to the affected families would have eased many initial concerns. 

Ultimately an institution’s image is made more by what it does than what it says, but the saying is also part of the doing. I would have arranged an immediate meeting between the Ateneo president and team coach and Rene’s family—and at least by Zoom with Divine’s—for them to personally explain what happened and to make the necessary amends.

Despite efforts to politicize and capitalize on the issue, I myself believe that what happened was a terrible accident, albeit a preventable one, with better foresight. Almost exactly a year ago, I lost a good friend, Don Rodis, to a rogue wave and riptide that pulled him into the waters off Los Cabos in Mexico; one minute he was just strolling on the beach, the next he was gone. 

That’s nature at its indifferent and cruelest worst, which, beyond preparing for, we can do little about. Human nature also arises spontaneously, in the shock, grief, and even anger that followed the accident. But human agency is something else—the “what could and should have been done’s,” both before and after the event.

I can imagine, as administrators would have instinctively responded, that Ateneo’s academic and athletic managers first called the lawyers in to find out who was responsible for what and what the university’s liabilities were. It’s a logical institutional reaction, but again Ateneo could have risen above that to show true compassion, which should come instantly and unbidden, without lawyers or preconditions. I have no doubt that the likes of Fr. Flavie Villanueva, Fr. Albert Alejo, or Fr. Robert Reyes would have rushed to and embraced the grieving mother if they could. 

(It has been a bad week for Ateneo in more ways. The athletes’ deaths obscured the passing of another prime Atenean talent, the poet and professor Rofel Brion. Rofel once said that “I write mostly about small, ordinary events, and in doing so, I capture them. I hold on to them and never let them go. And this, I guess, is how I pay homage to them.” This was his way of living the Ignatian principle of finding God in the ordinary. )

I have many friends at Ateneo and have even taught there—once as a substitute for the late Prof. Doreen Fernandez when she was unwell, and another time as the holder of its professorial chair in creative writing. While not particularly religious myself, I am a strong believer in its mission and in its products. I appreciate its efforts to diversify and to bring in more poor scholars into its fold. 

If Ateneo is as great as its history suggests, it will use this instance to reflect deeply on what it wants to be, and to be regarded as. I have no doubt that with sincere introspection and self-criticism, it will find the best ways to do right by the families of Rene and Divine, to run a fit and humane athletics program, to set the right policies and put the right people in place, and to reassure its community that it has recovered its true Ignatian spirit.

Qwertyman No. 201: Insenaty

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Qwertyman for Monday, June 8, 2026

YES, YOU read that right—it’s not a misspelling, just a new word I coined to describe the recent goings-on in the Philippine Senate, with the 13-person majority refusing to show up for work for the second straight day as of this writing. Anyone watching this charade from a foreign perspective—someone without any knowledge of or interest in Philippine politics, like the proverbial Martian—would scratch his/her/its head at this latest turn of events that began with Alan Peter Cayetano and his gang hijacking the Senate leadership on May 11 with the obvious intention of thwarting the impeachment of VP Sara Duterte and saving their own hides. (Update: Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian just got elected Senate President pro tempore on the third day of the majority “boycott,” after Sen. Chiz Escudero showed up and enabled a quorum to resume business. It’s entirely possible that by the time this piece comes out, the “majority” and “minority” I refer to here will have been reversed.)

I had been hoping to move on to another, less inflammatory topic, as much for my relief as yours, but Philippine politics is the gift (at least to opinion writers) that keeps on giving. It’s a sign of the times that my wife Beng—normally a quiet and placid spirit in whom the finest virtues of Buddhist kindness and Christian charity converge—has been spouting forth colorful expletives this past week, even marching to the Senate floor to hold up placards with the likes of Dean Winnie Monsod to demand service with integrity from our senators. That was the first day the majority decided (without telling anyone else) to do a no-show, leaving Beng even more infuriated at the thought of these people being paid P300,000 a month (or P10,000 for that day) on top of multiple perks to do—well, nothing, while impoverished seniors die of exhaustion at the ayuda line.

Indeed not a day goes by without some new cause for aggravation, some insistent reminder of how warped our values have become that many Filipinos can no longer tell right from wrong, and good from bad. Glaring examples are DDS memes equating Sen. Jinggoy Estrada—booked for plunder involving P573 million in kickbacks—with the late Sen. Ninoy Aquino, jailed under martial law for subversion. “We Are All Jinggoy!” proclaims one meme, echoing what we said for Ninoy, “Hindi Ka Nag-Iisa.” 

For his part, the Senate majority’s resident antidote to wisdom, Robin Padilla, opines that the cases of Leila de Lima and Bato de la Rosa were different, because the former was linked to drugs, and the latter to their extermination, conveniently forgetting the charges laid out against Bato by the International Criminal Court. In the latest episode of “The World According to DDS,” Senate President and Duterte running mate Alan Peter Cayetano characterizes his patron’s murderous tokhang “war on drugs” as “pro-life.” Duterte stalwart Rodante Marcoleta promises a blockbuster of a hearing by their bogus Blue Ribbon Committee featuring game-changing revelations by 18 “ex-Marines” who then make claims so preposterous that they should each be meted out 5,000 push-ups for poor storytelling. (They can always take it out on their sponsor, who put them up to it.)

That’s how topsy-turvy things have become in our society, of which our senators and their behavior are but representative. They come in tailored suits and ties, in barongs and native dress, in heavy make-up and botox for the cameras, but at their best and sadly also their worst they are not much different from the rest of us who put them there in the first place.

We’re not asking for or even dreaming about a happily unified Senate here, which is both impossible and frankly a danger to democracy. We just want a working and serving one, governed by reason, civility, and the law. If integrity, intelligence, and performance are too much to ask for, can they at least keep quiet, take their paychecks and emoluments, and pose for the media, but otherwise let their colleagues do their job?

Over the next couple of weeks until the impeachment trial begins on July 6, we expect the Senate to come to its senses and to set itself aright, very likely with a new majority formally elected by at least 13 members, to put it beyond all dispute. That will be a relief for a people who may initially have found some entertainment value in the Senate show, but are losing their patience with a dysfunctional institution their taxes are fattening, without getting much in return.

And let’s not delude ourselves into thinking that our problems will vanish with the installation of a new and more reasonable Senate majority, and not even with the impeachment of VP Sara. That’s the big mistake we made at EDSA; in our euphoria, we forgot that changes in leadership are far easier to pull off and to manage than changes in society and in the people themselves. We’ll be happy if and when the level-headed Sen. Sotto wrests back the Senate presidency or the apparent compromise candidate, Sen. Gatchalian, so the old Blue Ribbon Committee can pick up where it left off and resume its hearings on corruption in government, which has been bleeding us dry and which, come to think of it, has been at the root of all this drama.

I earlier said that in its division and divisiveness, the Senate is really us. Those rifts are real, and maybe they can’t be helped. But for what we’re paying them, we can demand of our senators that they not only represent us but be better than us, and show a better and working model of a functioning if divided democracy. Bring sanity back to the Senate, and maybe then we’ll survive.

Qwertyman No. 200: The Training of Leaders

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Qwertyman for Monday, June 1, 2026

OVER THE past few weeks, we’ve increasingly despaired over the quality of leadership displayed by the current majority in the Philippine Senate—perceived by many as a hopeless collection of liars, thieves, and opportunists intent only on preserving their power and filling their pockets. The public mood is murderous, and understandably so. Every new session day at the Senate seems to offer only more proof of this majority’s imperviousness to truth, reason, and justice—indeed to any real measure of public accountability. 

One has but to look at its nominees to the Blue Ribbon Committee—the Senate body tasked with investigating corruption and the misuse of public funds—to see how absurdly tragicomic things have become, with senators facing a host of related charges themselves now in charge of protecting the national treasury. Ali Baba would feel right at home in this company.

But beneath our collective anger and despair over this situation lies the question: how did we even get here? How did we elect senators who can’t even form a coherent paragraph, who break the law instead of making it, who see and use public office as a family business?

The path to rulership in Philippine politics provides some quick and obvious answers. In this country, you become a senator, congressman, governor, or even president through several well-traveled routes: family, entertainment, and media. Dynastic politics mainly explains why we have four pairs of siblings—the Cayetanos, the Villars, the Ejercito-Estradas, and the Tulfos in the Senate, eight out of 24 senators, although the Tulfos are new in the game, emerging not out some gilded family tree but from that other prodigious birther of instant celebrity, the media. 

Long before “influencer” became a buzzword and apparently a profession, the media—both traditional and now the social—groomed not just its favorites but the public as well, projecting style as substance, talk as thought, image as soul. Entertainment has warped our sense of reality even more disastrously, morphing movie stars and sports figures into shapers and enforcers of economic and social policy. 

Many of these people enter public office without the foggiest idea of what public administration means and requires, hoping to learn on the job, banking on their popularity and media savvy to carry them through the maze of legislation, the budget process, national security, and social development. Some expect a one-week crash course on Public Ad in UP to sustain them through their new career; all will certainly hire professional help to dress well, look good, and sound sensible (at least in their prepared speeches and press releases). It’s when they’re on their own, responding to questions in front of the microphones whether on the Senate floor or in the corridor outside, that the real vacuousness of the person shows through.

All this leads us to ask what the proper training of a proper politician should be—a question that various civilizations, cultures, and countries have answered differently throughout history. The ancient Greeks were fascinated by and struggled with the idea of the wise and just philosopher king—who, paradoxically, was at best someone not interested in ruling. We’re told that Alexander—long before he became “the Great”—was tutored by Aristotle in rhetoric and philosophy, among other disciplines. 

The Romans trained their leaders by having them serve in a series of positions through which they gained practical experience in everything from the law and logistics to war. The Chinese had officials in training master basic Confucian texts and write essays for examinations that tested their moral reasoning. Islamic leaders were forged in studies of statecraft, literature, and the law, emphasizing the accountability of those who ruled to their Maker.

In the West, the great argument was whether over leaders required virtue to govern well; Erasmus said yes, Machiavelli said no. The Jesuits stressed the formation of both spirit and intellect, the English rose up through public school and Oxbridge connections, the Americans relied on self-cultivation. These are all large and loose concepts that could be refined, but what they share is a solid grounding in education, in the adequate preparation of body, mind, and spirit for the rigors of governance and rulership.

But what impressed me most when I looked back at these past practices was a written conversation I had with an old friend from grade school, Tofi Reyes, who grew up to be an American-educated engineer working in Japan, where he has lived long enough to master its language and culture. 

Tofi tells me that “At the Matsushita Institute of Government, students must do ‘Dawn Training’ every morning, consisting of a 3-kilometer run on Chigakasaki Beach to build endurance, after which they spend 45 minutes sweeping, cleaning the campus to build humility. Once a year, the students must do a 100-kilometer trek in the Miura hills, which they must finish within 24 hours to build endurance and teamwork. Before the students analyze policy or economics, they must first study human nature and ethics. Then they learn and practice the Japanese of practice of sunao—which means to cultivate a mind free from prejudice, ego, and emotional bias. In this approach, you consciously pause your inner defense attorney. You listen to the input as raw data first, without instantly attaching labels like ‘right,’ ‘wrong,’ ‘offensive,’ or ‘brilliant.’ They are trained to ask, ‘If I didn’t care about who wins this argument, what is the core truth being said here?’ Then they study human nature and the responsibility of leadership. The tea ceremony (sado) and Zen meditation are also part of the curriculum. Then they dive into international geopolitics, macroeconomic stability, regional revitalization, or educational reform. Students must also experience working as an intern on the factory floor of a manufacturing plant, then work within agricultural communities, then finally as congressional aides in the Japanese Legislature (the Diet). Then they do an overseas internship in the US Congress. Then back in Japan, they must sweep the streets of the town where their school is located. After all that, the school does not grant any diploma, just to keep them humble (and to discourage credentialism). One graduate of the above program is the current Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.”

I’ll admit to having paused at that mention of a 100-kilometer, 24-hour march for CEOs-in-the-making—surely it was an exaggeration? But no; I looked it up and sure enough it was doable and regularly done, not to encourage competitiveness but rather cooperation, to ensure that everyone in one’s cohort came through. 

It’s a little late in the day to send our truant senators back to school—although I’m sure many of us would love to see them take that long hike—but we can still learn, not so much from their mistakes but ours. 

When a senator embarrasses himself by flaunting his appalling ignorance without the slightest hint of self-awareness, it is we as a nation who should be embarrassed for having allowed that to happen in the first place. The education of a politician should be preceded by the education of the electorate, which seems even harder to manage.