Category Archives: Education

Qwertyman No. 211: Saving the Newborn

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Qwertyman for Monday, August 17, 2026

GIVEN ALL the political, economic, and even meteorological turmoil we’ve recently been going through, I thought I’d write about something undeniably and visibly positive this week, if only to remind us that good things are possible if the “whole of government”—including even our fractious Senate—puts its mind to it. 

Full disclosure: I’ve been editing a book on, of all things, the Philippine Newborn Screening (NBS) program, and I’ve been so impressed by what I’ve come across that I requested and secured permission from its author, Dr. Carmencita D. Padilla, to share some highlights of that program. Dr. Menchit, as we call her, is no ordinary physician; a clinical geneticist and pediatrician, former chancellor of UP Manila and a key figure behind its National Institutes of Health, she was named National Scientist in 2023 for her contributions to medicine.

Back in 1990, Menchit had just returned from a fellowship in Sydney, brimming with enthusiasm about NBS, which had already been adopted and routinely practiced in Australia. 

What NBS addresses is this: babies can be born with any of almost 30 conditions inimical to their health, including congenital hypothyroidism (mental retardation and growth delay, with IQ loss possible as early as the second week of life), congenital adrenal hyperplasia (salt-wasting crisis, shock, death by the end of the first week), PKU, and galactosemia. 

A newborn with any of these conditions looks perfectly well: doctors and mothers will see no rash, no fever, no warning. Looking healthy, the baby will go home, with the disorder hidden for months, or even years, until the symptoms appear—by which time, it could be too late to reverse the damage. Ironically, if the problems are spotted early, there are treatments available, often as simple and as cheap as a modified milk formula for phenylketonuria (PKU), which causes irreversible intellectual disability if left alone.

So early screening of all newborns is key. The process itself is fairly straightforward: “puncturing the heel of a newborn, absorbing a few drops of blood onto a special filter paper card, and transporting the specimen to a specialized laboratory for testing.” These cards could be easily mailed to a central laboratory. In the early 1960s, an American microbiologist named Dr. Robert Guthrie—whose own son and niece suffered from developmental problems—created a test to scan blood samples for indicators of anomalies and proposed this solution. But the medical and scientific communities shunned him, until sufficient publicity forced them to see he was right.

It would take more than 30 years for NBS to reach the Philippines, largely through the efforts of Dr. Carmelita Fagela-Domingo, who had seen NBS working in the West and tried her best to persuade the Philippine health bureaucracy to adopt it, and Dr. Padilla, who finally succeeded where Dr. Domingo had initially failed.

What worked for Menchit Padilla was the support of people like Dr. Domingo herself and UP College of Medicine Dean Alfredo Ramirez, and subsequently other allies in both executive and legislative branches beyond academia. Together, the two women pushed for a comprehensive pilot study that could form the basis for official government policy. Padilla also met Dr. Guthrie, who encouraged her to persevere in the effort.

Twenty-four Philippine hospitals took part in the study as members of the NBS Study Group. Private donors contributed computers, video cameras, fax machines, and pagers. A Finnish company donated a refurbished NBS machine. By 1997 the program was well underway. What was needed now was for the DOH to take over for the program’s full implementation nationwide. By 2000, there were still less than 200 hospitals out of 3,000 birthing hospitals participating in the program.

What was needed was an enabling law. This is the part of the story that I find most instructive, given our current Senate, and which I urged Dr. Menchit to include in her book (which she did, despite her initial misgivings). 

Because they couldn’t afford a lobby group, Menchit took it upon herself to draft the bill—after enrolling for a Master of Arts in Health Policy Studies degree at UP Manila. (I wonder how many of our lawmakers would go that far to get things done right—but then of course they have millions to spend on staff.)

Versions of the bill were filed at the House and Senate early in 2003, but by mid-year, hearings had yet to begin. To get the bill certified as urgent, its proponents had to get the support of Sen. Juan Flavier, who warned them that it would likely take ten years to get the bill passed. Desperate, Padilla turned to Sen. Loren Legarda, who was still hosting a talk show; between breaks, Menchit filled her in and persuaded Loren to start hearings on the bill and to file her own version, which she did on August 1. I’ll leave the rest to Dr. Padilla’s recollection:

“With barely three days until the end of the 12th Congress, we were advised to lodge an appeal for an ‘urgent bill’ with the House Presidential Legislative Liaison Officer, Undersecretary Bernardino Sayo. 

“It was a Wednesday, 5 pm. We went to his office at the House of Representatives. After listening to our desperate appeal, which was supported with albums full of pictures of saved and not-saved babies, Undersecretary Sayo agreed to arrange for a certification of an ‘urgent bill’ to be signed by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo the following day Thursday at 10 am. We were advised to return to the House of Representatives the following day for the second reading at 4 pm, the last day of the session at the House. With the bill now certified as urgent, our schedule for a second reading was bumped up. House Majority Floor Leader Neptali Gonzales, fortunately for us, helped the bill pass the second reading in the midst of calls for adjournment from the floor. 

“Garnering a unanimous affirmative vote, the bill moved to the required final third reading the following day, Friday, the last day of the 12th Congress. I received a phone call at 6:30pm from the Chief of Staff of Senator Flavier, Mon Navarra. He said ‘The NBS bill was passed into law! We were able to do it in 10 months—not 10 years!’ And since the House had adopted the Senate version in its earlier deliberations, there was no need for a bicameral session. We just had to wait for the signature of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, which happened on April 7, 2004.”

The NBS bill, RA 9288, had itself become something of a miracle baby, giving hope to millions of newborns and the yet-unborn. Today well over 90 percent of Filipino newborns are covered by NBS, with a 100% rate targeted by 2028. Would that our government were so singularly and charitably minded in our other national priorities, especially for those already long born! 

(Top image from miraclefeet.org)

Qwertyman No. 210: A Grand Experiment with AI

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Qwertyman for Monday, August 10, 2026

TOMORROW, TUESDAY morning, will be the first day of the class I’m teaching this semester at the University of the Philippines in Diliman. I retired seven years ago, but as professor emeritus have availed myself of the option to keep teaching at least one course. I don’t have to, and sometime soon I might stop and take a proper rest, but I think it’s good for both my young students and myself to keep up what amounts to an intergenerational dialogue. 

Even in UP, too many courses are being taught by instructors just a few years older than the class. That’s good for communication and relatability of thought and treatment, and sure, the alternative of being lectured by your grandfather isn’t exactly thrilling. But I feel that now, more than ever, we need to bridge what the 1960s called the “generation gap” to make mutual sense of the world we’re living in, which is probably just as perplexing for me as for them. 

I usually teach at the graduate level, but for the first time in years (if not the last), I’ll be handling an undergraduate class, at my department’s request. It’s a course for seniors called Creative Writing 198: Special Topics (Professional Writing), which I myself designed and first taught over twenty years ago. It’s aimed at providing English, literature, and CW majors with the practical writing skills they hardly learn in school. They may know their Shakespeare and Salinger, their Defoe and Derrida, their Virginia Woolf and Virginia Moreno—but they can’t write an application letter, a news report, a feature story, a brochure, a speech, an AV script, or do a proper interview. 

In other words, they can’t write for a living, which is what the big, bad “real world” beyond graduation expects them to do. They get all starry-eyed about writing that great sci-fi or romance novel that will bring them international fame—and yes, who’s to say it won’t ever happen—but they’ll quickly realize that you need a day job to pay for all the instant noodles and pizza (not to mention the studio, the wi-fi, and the commutes) that dreams are made on. So—drawing on all my years as a self-styled “Swiss Army Knife” of writing—I designed CW 198, from which at least two generations of students have now emerged. I’m happy that many still write me back to say that it was one of the most useful courses they ever took. (To those who can’t study with me, you can take a look at my book, Windows on Writing, published by Vibal Press.)

I’m writing this not to advertise the course, which should be fully subscribed by now, but to share the anxieties and apprehensions that many teachers—from full professors down to the greenest instructor—are facing: how to teach writing in the age of AI. The last time I taught CW 198, AI was still something of a joke; I’d ask it to write something in the style of Nick Joaquin and it would throw up laughably pseudo-romantic garbage. 

I do recall, however, saying even then that AI was bound to catch up in time. That time has come, and we’re no longer laughing. The uncanny and frankly scary speed and precision with which AI has learned to mimic human writing—yes, your writing, if you feed it with enough examples—tell us that human thinking can’t be too difficult to approximate if not exceed. (Here, bring in your favorite senator, and you’ll see how low the bar is set. And it’s hard to accuse AI of being “soulless” when so many people and their productions are exactly that.) 

Not surprisingly, AI in education has been met with fear and suspicion, if not outright hostility. There have been reports of professors retiring early to escape the aggravation of having to chase after AI-assisted cheaters, and of having to sort out the natural from the artificial. All over the world, and all over academia, there have been movements against AI, or at least against its abuse and misuse—an aversion extended to all digital media. 

Sweden leads the world in moving back from digital screens to paper in its basic education; phone bans in school are now in effect in Denmark, Finland, France, and Italy, among others, as part of this “analog revival” to improve reading skills. Following such models as the University of Chicago Law School, the UP College of Law will now forbid law freshmen from bringing and using their digital devices in class, to encourage critical thinking.

I agree with these moves, especially at the foundational levels of education. At the same time, let me state what I think clearly: we reject or ignore AI at our own peril. It’s not going away, it will keep getting smarter, and our young people will be using it ten years from now with neither guilt nor shame, making precise prompts with natural fluency. I’m not saying that all the ethical questions will have been swept aside by then, but the major technical challenges (yes, with ethical dimensions) like AI’s enormous water and power requirements should have been resolved, likely with AI’s own help. 

That said, what am I going to do with my CW 198 class? I’ve decided that instead of banning it outright (which I suspect will be futile in any case) we’ll use AI—to see what it does and what we can do differently or better. I’ll have them do in-class writing to establish benchmarks, and then we’ll ask AI to come up with its own version. What AI says won’t be the standard by which papers will be scored, although it might be superior in some mechanical ways like grammar and spelling. We’ll see how AI shapes its arguments, against how we might approach the topic and present examples. We’ll put a premium on original thinking, on expressing individuality, focusing not so much on “getting it right” as on “making it mine.” 

I frankly don’t know how this will all work out, but at 72, I’ll be taking a privileged peek over the horizon, embarking on a grand experiment in the spirit of that poem recently recalled by “The Odyssey”: to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

(image from noveltymediaworld.com)

Qwertyman No. 206: The Unfinished Building

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Qwertyman for Monday, July 13, 2026

AS I noted in a Facebook post last week, attending a graduation at the University of the Philippines, as I did last July 5th, always brings a tear to my eye, especially when everyone sings “UP Naming Mahal” at the closing. No matter all the heartaches, disappointments, and challenges we may have gone through in UP as a student, teacher, administrator, and alumnus, and no matter all our disagreements over failed policies, missed opportunities, and misdirected priorities—as an institution, this university of the people remains immutably noble in purpose, an ideal constantly being realized. 

More than 5,000 students graduated from Diliman last week, as well as many more thousands in UP’s eight other constituent universities across the country. Thousands came away with honors—raising the question of whether our students have really gotten that much better, or if our standards seem to be getting laxer; the debate goes on, although no one’s taking anything away from the laureates. This was, after all—as UP President Angelo Jimenez noted—the last pandemic batch to graduate, who entered UP in extremely difficult circumstances, tied down to Zoom, without the benefit of campus life for a significant period.

I sat at the grandstand in Quezon Hall as a professor emeritus among the university’s officials and guests, recalling how I had stood on the other side of that amphitheater more than four decades ago, wondering what the future would be like (short answer: 35 more years in UP). I would become a professor, an administrator, and a retiree, as deeply engaged in university affairs as I had been as an activist toting a molotov cocktail (which I never threw) at the Diliman Commune in 1971. 

That morning’s guest speaker was former Ombudsman and Justice Conchita Carpio Morales, whose biography I had written, so I was glad to run into her at the processional, and I urged her to give everyone a piece of her famous mind. “I’ll be gentle today,” she told me, smiling. Taking off on this year’s commencement theme of “Gumagalang” or “respectfully,” she spoke on the need for respect of the law at a time of great confusion over who and what to follow. 

“In a world increasingly divided by arrogance, intolerance, and indifference, the call to gumalang (respect) is not merely timely, but urgent,” she said. “As a magistrate, it pains me to see lawmakers alleged to be lawbreakers. Rules bent, redefined, or misinterpreted to suit individual or group interests. There is little paggalang for those who have limited or no voice at all. The powerless have become dispensable…. The rule of law is the bedrock of democracy. Sadly, in many parts of the world today, the rule of law is being disregarded…. Unfortunately, what we increasingly see today in many places is the rule of man, where the exercise of power depends less on the law and more on the whims, preferences, or interests of those who hold office.” At the same time, she emphasized that “respect” could not be used as an excuse for authoritarianism, or for stifling contrary voices. (And before you ask, no, I didn’t write or draft those words for her. Nobody writes CCM’s speeches but herself, and if you did, she’d very likely pepper your draft with corrections, as generations of her law clerks well know.)

That was particularly apt in UP, where the commencement ceremonies ended with the customary (by now) lightning rally, and while some slogans sounded rather tired, this year’s emphasis on fighting corruption gave it a particular urgency. UP Diliman’s graduation was taking place on the eve of the opening of the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte at the Senate, titanic confrontation on both sides of which prominent UP alumni were ranged. 

The irony of the moment could hardly be overstated. Historically, UP has been known to be a bastion of dissent, a haven of nonconformists and rebels of all stripes and colors. I often cite the examples of then UP President Rafael Palma’s daughter Fe, who took part in the first documented student protest action in 1933, a boycott prompted by a tuition fee increase, and of President Manuel L. Quezon being lambasted for extravagance by a young hothead named Ferdinand Marcos. 

Since the 1960s and 1970s , UP has acquired—inaccurately, I think—a reputation for being a breeding ground of communists, a convenient target for such Red-taggers as the NTF-ELCAC and a good excuse for its billions in funds. (Which reminds me: they should set up an NTF-ELCAC to seek and weed out the corrupt.) People forget that for every Joma Sison we produced a Juan Ponce Enrile; for every Benito Tiamzon a Fabian Ver; for every Lean Alejandro an Alan Peter Cayetano; for every Lorie Barros a Pia Cayetano. 

As I emphasize whenever I can, even at the height of student activism, the radical Left was always in the minority in UP as it probably was elsewhere; we were just noisier, better organized, more determined, and literally ready to die for our cause. 

What the usual UP narrative also often ignores is the fact that many of us from the Left who survived the First Quarter Storm and martial law moved toward the liberal middle—indeed, some even to the far Right, becoming its ideologues, executors, and apologists. 

Surveying this year’s crop of bright and starry-eyed graduates, hundreds of them finishing with high honors, I wondered how many of them would, in the next twenty or thirty years, materially contribute to our people’s well-being, and also how many to its deterioration. I don’t think anyone goes to graduation with malice aforethought, but life has a strange way of shaping and testing character in a way that classrooms simply can’t. As we learned in martial-law prison, sometimes it’s the most seemingly inflexible who prove the most brittle and break.

At the ceremonies, pointed comments were made by some deans presenting their graduates about all the unfinished buildings on campus—the new Faculty Center has been a decade in the making, with the refurbishment of Abelardo Hall and the UP Main Library trailing closely behind. These delays can largely be traced to mismanagement under the old DPWH, a couple of projects possibly even tied to the Discayas. 

But it struck me that the truly unfinished building to contemplate is the university itself, in constant reconstruction under pressure from AI, global rankings, and the needs of the people it remains accountable to. Just having marked its 118th anniversary, it could yet be the Sagrada Familia of our national aspirations.

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. 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. 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.

Qwertyman No. 197: Cultural Lobotomy

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Qwertyman for Monday, May 11, 2026

OUR FRIEND Toym Imao, among our most talented and productive sculptors, also serves as dean of the UP College of Fine Arts where my wife Beng teaches art conservation. Lately, like many academic administrators, Toym’s been feeling embattled because of the lack of resources given to his college, whose buildings may look new and good on the outside but whose roofs leak, among other ailments and deficiencies. (At least they have a building; my home College of Arts and Letters is still a vagrant in Diliman, more than ten years after the Faculty Center burned down.) Beng—who envisions the creation of a formal art conservation program and center in UP to serve the country’s longstanding needs in this area—sometimes has to teach in the garage of our campus home for lack of table space in their department. 

Let me quote a few salient lines from Toym’s self-described “rant,” which he published online:

“When students are treated as customers (rather than our future), when education becomes a service (than a mission), and when institutions are driven by metrics, compliance, and efficiency, we lose something essential.

“We lose the art school as a space of imagination. As a space of critique and discourse. As a space where we form not just skills, but ways of thinking. A space of engagement and confrontation. A space to take risks and make mistakes in a nurturing environment.

“An art school is not a diploma factory, it is a well of souls, it is a spirit house. If we lose these purposes, we do not just weaken education. We weaken our culture, we lose our spirit as a nation.”

But now Toym & Co. are up against an even bigger enemy, beyond leaking roofs and bureaucratic indifference: a government-sponsored initiative to gut the humanities and to bleed it out of the college curriculum so young Filipinos could enter the workforce sooner. 

The comeuppance of certain pseudo-journalists aside, no issue stood out in our FB feeds over this past week as much as the widespread outrage over the Commission on Higher Education’s proposed “Reframed General Education” program, cutting required GE units from 36 down to 18. They’ll do this by shoehorning the old (and already much-compressed) arts and humanities courses into such brainy-sounding but essentially hollow subjects as “Data, Evidence, and Ethics in a Knowledge Society” (which sounds to me like a puffed-up way of saying “Don’t use AI to plagiarize and write your homework,” which I’ll bet is how it’s going to be taught).

It isn’t hard to imagine how this act of cultural lobotomy came about: the CHED people were given marching orders from the start to find a way of cramming some GE subjects into a three-year curriculum. Never mind what kind of chop suey recipe they would come up with—like mixing a smattering of Philippine history into a sludge of Rizal; just fit everything in three years, and all will be well. 

I’m not even going to discuss in detail how and why the CHED proposal is such a sad, silly, an even stupid solution to a problem that, to begin with, is ill-defined. You can look up the analyses of people more attuned to the theory of education than I am—aside from Toym Imao, experts like Profs. Antonio P. Contreras, Mark Joseph Calano, and Jose Wendell Capili have already written extensively about this, and about the necessity of the humanities in our formation as humans and citizens. 

I will, however, raise a few points and questions for further thought:

Is the problem employability, of not teaching our young the skills our workplaces require? Are the arts and humanities–including language and history—therefore excess baggage that workers don’t need to do their jobs well?

General education isn’t about creating unemployable artists. It’s about helping ordinary people think like artists do—creatively, intuitively, critically, out of the box, to find better viewpoints and solutions than numbers alone can provide. And speaking of unemployed artists, why not build up and support creative industries like South Korea and other countries do, to channel our natural abilities in design, performance, and expression into globally competitive endeavors?

And who and where are the synoptic geniuses who are going to teach these massively integrated courses? Instructors who have a hard time teaching even basic English, and whose own grasp of history and philosophy is tenuous at best?

There’s a lot of the “digital” in the “reframed” GE program, a nod to the pervasiveness of the Internet and AI in education. But the real challenge is not how to detect and use AI, but to be naturally intelligent: to think and reason for yourself without reaching for your phone.

Bad education isn’t going to fix a bad economy and bad governance. But a good education that teaches young people the difference between right and wrong and between good and bad—and only the humanities can do that—will help them elect good leaders who can then make the best decisions for our economic well-being. 

“We have to do something!” cried Beng, as always the more ardent activist between the two of us. “Let’s rally in front of CHED. Let’s show them how strongly we feel about this issue!”

Of course I’ll go march with Beng wherever she goes, but I suspect that in this day and age, rallies don’t work as well as they used to. You’ll shout yourselves hoarse telling your co-marchers things they already know, while the people inside the office go about making coffee and sharing BTS chismis. You might get on the evening news, in between a mugging and a fashion piece.

You have to find the people who can actually change policy, and exert pressure there. They’re in Congress and the Senate, which controls the pursestrings and can make state university presidents and agency heads mumble like marionettes at budget hearings.

The trouble is, even people you’d expect to know better don’t seem to know any better. Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian, who chairs the Senate Basic Education  Committee while co-chairing the influential Edcom 2, is behind the push to cut college down to three years. His proposed Senate Bill 51 aiming for just that is the wind behind the CHED technical committee’s wings. That leaves us with Higher Education Committee Chair Loren Legarda, a staunch champion of the arts and culture, to bear the burden of our arguments in the arena where it matters.

She’ll have a lot of championing to do, against the likes of Sen. Robinhood Padilla, (mind you, the one in charge of constitutional amendments) who has opined that the job of opposition senators is, well, to oppose anything and everything. Indeed, the fact that we have people like him in the Senate is the best argument for a strong GE program—not just to educate them, but to make sure young Filipinos don’t vote donkeys (I’m using the kinder term here) into the Senate ever again.

Just thinking about it makes me want to put on my marching shoes, and I don’t care if Beng and I end up shouting into the wind. 

Qwertyman No. 196: Caught in the Crossfire

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Qwertyman for Monday, May 4, 2026

THIS IS a piece I dread writing, knowing that I am bound to say something over the next thousand words that will almost certainly offend, dismay, and even enrage some people who might have thought better of me otherwise. But I also feel that it will be a gross dereliction of the duty that comes with the privilege of being published on this page if I avoided commentary on one of the most painful headlines to have sprung up this past week. 

I am not a political scientist, a theorist, or a coffeeshop regular with access to backroom information, so as I often do, I will draw on personal memory and experience—on the distant but insistent past—to reflect on the present.

I refer, of course, to the recent deaths of 19 young Filipinos—two of them American citizens—at the hands of the Philippine military in Toboso, Negros Occidental in what the military described as an “armed encounter,” which a New People’s Army spokesman denounced as a “ruthless massacre” that included civilian students and activists embedded in the community.

It is not difficult for me to see how a bright young college student like Alyssa Alano would find herself in that far-off barangay, living with the locals and studying their way of life. I think she and her comrades knew the risks of being there and getting caught in the crossfire of a long-running war. Whether they believed or not in the armed struggle, they entered its deadly embrace. Even RJ Ledesma’s presence in a combat zone, I could understand. As an 18-year-old reporter at the Philippines Herald, I begged my editors to send me to Isabela, when we heard that a ship called the Karagatan had arrived to deliver arms to the NPA; I was certain it was a government plot (it was not) and wanted to discredit it. The desk sagely ignored me.

But one thing I can assume is that Alyssa & Co. were spurred by a genuine desire to serve the people, in that particular way, in that particular place and time. We may disagree with the methodology and certainly the results, but we can grant them the sincerity if not the nobility of their intentions. 

I recall a summer back in the early 1970s when I joined a cohort of UP Nationalist Corps members—mostly city-bred teenagers—in week-long “learn from the masses” trips to the countryside in Quezon and Bulacan where we lived with the common folk and subsisted on our purposely meager rations and whatever shrimp we could catch in the leech-infested river. There were no NPAs with us, nor did anyone indoctrinate us; we were there to realize our fundamental ignorance of and disconnection from the vast majority of our impoverished people. However, I have to admit that if the purpose of these sorties was to de-romanticize life in the countryside, to steer our perceptions away from Amorsolo’s gilded sunsets, the effect (at least on me) was the exact opposite. I came away even more convinced that struggle and sacrifice in the midst of suffering were heroic. The experience only confirmed what I had read in high school, in William Pomeroy’s The Forest, detailing the arduous treks of the old Huks in the mountains: I was looking at hard reality through a soft lyrical lens.

If I had not been arrested and imprisoned here in Manila in 1973, I would very possibly have gone on to the countryside, like many of my comrades did, and been killed within two weeks because of my sheer incompetence and ineptitude at guerrilla warfare, which most college boys and girls are simply not trained to do (and then again, quite a few learned and survived). 

And that perhaps was the most traumatic part of those times—receiving and viewing the horribly mangled bodies of our fallen friends, hearing the screaming at the UP Chapel over someone whose skull had been blown open: “That’s not him, that’s not him!” There was much criticism last week of someone’s use of “corned beef” to describe the Toboso dead as crassly inhuman, but I can confirm that it was a term we ourselves used—carne norte—for the bodies that came back shredded not even in hermetic body bags but in rice sacks.

Now we, too, have been caught in the crossfire, horrified by the wanton slaughter of our young but unsure of whom and what to believe in. An independent inquiry is absolutely called for, yes, to establish what happened, determine accountability, and define the rules of engagement in these circumstances. The brutality of that assault was barbaric in its execution. But exactly who are accountable, and what for?

I worry that these remarks could create more confusion than clarity. But sometimes we need to be unsettled or unmoored from our stoutest presumptions to begin to understand ourselves, and what we believe in, and why. One thing I’ve noticed about both extremes on the Left and Right is how certain they seem to be about everything, as if they had the whole universe and its rights and wrongs all figured out, and expect nothing less than absolute belief and compliance from their recruits and adherents. At one point in my life this was true of me; I could quote from Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book” chapter and verse, and lived by its tenets (or at least tried to, inevitably failing in matters of personal discipline).

As I grew older, I began to appreciate the value of doubt, and even of skepticism. Mao may have been a brilliant revolutionary, but he also became a fat and filthy sexual predator (whose tomb I even visited twice in Beijing). The organ that generations of idealistic young people venerated turned out to be as murderous and as cynical as its professed enemies. 

If I were asked to advise a granddaughter or a nephew in college how to fight for justice and freedom, and if that girl or boy seemed intent on joining the armed struggle, whether as an observer or combatant (note that the military does not distinguish between them), this is what I will probably say: “I cannot stop you from doing what you so fervently believe in, because I would have done the same thing in my time. But think about this, before you go: your time is different, and many things have changed. I know that poverty and injustice have not gone away, and may even have worsened. 

“But if there is something that half a century of struggle has taught us, it is that violence, however justified, never really works; it will only be met with even greater violence, with tragic results for all. The harder battles to fight are right here—in the communities you know and can influence, for the issues that matter to them. You do not need to go far to reach the suffering and the underserved: they are around you, wherever you turn. 

“Fifty years ago we may have had little choice but to go underground; today we have civil society to embrace your causes. Call me defeatist, cowardly, or myopic, or even a comfort to the enemy; but I remain alive and fighting for truth, justice, and freedom the best ways I can, which include what I’m telling you now—the strongest weapons are in your hearts and minds, not in your hands.”

Penman No. 485: Forever Young—in Yearbooks

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Penman for Sunday, May 3, 2026

THERE’S SOMETHING terribly sad and yet also strangely soothing about thumbing through the pages of college and high school yearbooks from decades past. As a diehard UP alum and collector of UP memorabilia, I’ve accumulated a stack of yearbooks from the University of the Philippines called the Philippinensian (a name likely inspired by that from one of UP’s formative models, the University of Michigan’s Michiganensian). 

Going through them inevitably fills me with what I know to be a naïve longing for seemingly simpler times; the past gets rosier the farther we move away from it. But these images, imbued with innocence, still offer relief from today’s sordid realities. When I look at the youthful visages of such figures as Juan Ponce Enrile and Jose Ma. Sison, I am reminded that we had choices, and that, while indicative, college could be too soon to plot the full trajectory of our lives. Yearbooks are also, of course, an intellectual and social history of the university itself, balancing the frilly fun of a Cadena de Amor with the sonorous seriousness of editorial commentary.

The first issue of the Philippinensian came out in 1915, seven years after UP opened in 1908—occasioned, argued its editors, by the realization that “There has heretofore been little consolidation of interests on the part of students of the University and the so-called University spirit, which should be stronger here because of the maturer quality of the students enrolled, was subordinated to the college spirit.” (I was fortunate to find a copy of this maiden volume, once owned and signed by Guillermo Tolentino.) 

In 1928, the Philippinensian apparently assumed the name of UP Alpha. If you studied then at the College of Liberal Arts your professors would have been people like Maximo Kalaw, Conrado Benitez, H. Otley Beyer, Vidal Tan, Carlos P. Romulo, Maria Agoncillo, Paz Marquez Benitez, Manuel Bernabe, Jose P. Laurel, Marcial Lichauco, Mauro and Mendez, and Pura Santillan. The college’s editorialist expressed the tenuous hope that education would resolve the class struggle: “Far out in the villages away from cities reign ignorance, selfishness, suspicion, all things that a life of isolation and narrow-mindedness afford. We recognize the need for light in those nooks, that light which will add strength of vision to the eyes of the unlearned, which will make them see the invisible ties that unite hearts the world over. We are aware of the selfish exploitation of the poor by those who have greater cunning, and higher intelligence; but we believe that the broadening of the sympathies of the latter and the opening of their closed, hard hearts will banish away all suspicion and hatred that rend souls asunder.”

A decade later, the 1938 Philippinensian opened with a dedication to that year’s commencement speaker, Field Marshal Douglas A. MacArthur, followed by postcard-worthy shots of UP’s Manila campus, carefully curated to show off its best facets. The staging creates ironic if not tragic overtones, especially when taken with the photographs at book’s end of UP’s cadets in smart formation, many of whom would march into the maw of war in a few years. Padre Faura itself would be bombed to ruins, albeit with the Oblation statue still standing defiantly.

After the war, with school having been closed for a while and the whereabouts of hundreds of students and graduates unknown, the Philippinensian resumed in 1946 under the temporary banner of the UP Phoenix 1942-1946, to cover the lost years. The yearbook staff could only note that “Some letters [of invitation to the yearbook] were received postmarked ‘return to sender’ for various reasons: “addressee unknown,” “no such address,” “moved.” In many cases, the addresses were among those burned or shelled during the war. In a few cases, the graduates were already dead. But so long as there was a clue, no matter how unreliable, the staff did not fail to track it down, sending letters, again and again, to the same person, at different addresses.”

Among those who fortunately responded were Narita Manuel of San Andres, Manila, BSE 1942 (soon to marry a writer named NVM Gonzalez); Damiana Ligon Eugenio of Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija, BSE 1942, cum laude(long before assuming the deanship of Philippine folkloric studies); and Renato Constantino of Manila, PhB 1946, cum laude, then already working for the Malacañang PR Office. (There were no privacy issues then, and one’s full address could be published at will.)

The closer we get to the present, the more familiar the names become, although their juvenile faces always come as a surprise. My mother Emy—who turns 98 next Sunday—was among those who first made the move from Padre Faura to Diliman. She appears as Emilia A. Yap, BSE, from Guinbirayan, Sta. Fe, Romblon, in the 1953 Philippinensian, a volume in which also appear such luminaries as Rafael M. Salas, Rony V. Diaz, Amelia Lapeña, Andrez Cristobal Cruz, Jose T. Joya, and Napoleon V. Abueva. For many alums, the ‘50s were UP’s golden age, and the yearbook reflects that; with the war over, it could claim that “The UP spirit is of beauty…. The tradition of looking for beauty everywhere, even where none is supposed to exist, is born… to temper an otherwise skeptical, cynical mind.”

But by the end of that decade, on the cusp of the ‘60s, and in the midst of the great debates between secular liberals and sectarian conservatives on campus, UP had to be ever reminded of its unique position as social critic. Introducing the 1958 Philippinensian marking UP’s golden jubilee, E. San Juan intoned that “Ours is an age of rebellion…. Man of the twentieth century… strives for a blessedness yet unbestowed, the blessedness incarnated in him as rebel-artist.” Petronilo Bn. Daroy would warn the following year that “It is at this point that we begin to see the estrangement of the university from the mainsprings of life, from the fact of the national reality. With politics controlling the focus and acting as guidepost from which the university must stand to gain its angle of vision, the reality that is revealed for inspection is necessarily fragmented and false.” 

UP’s vibrant social and cultural life continued, with the fraternities and sororities leading the way. The yearbooks lauded the smartest and the prettiest. But the dark clouds were gathering, and the mood was shifting. Writing in the 1966 Philippinensian, Temario C. Rivera began his essay with a stinging line: “Frivolity has always been the most vicious stigma of youth.” But, he concludes, invoking protests around the world, “The youth have finally come of age.”

In a few more years, the First Quarter Storm and the Diliman Commune would erupt, and the last Philippinensian would come out in 1971; the last Cadena de Amor had taken place in 1968. Many of those street warriors, myself included, would live on to their seventies and eighties, brandishing canes and hostage to metformin.

But in these yearbook pages, full of faces brimming with hope and idealism, we remain forever young and forever free.

Qwertyman No. 191: A Letter to Julie

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Qwertyman for Monday, March 30, 2026

I HAVE a dear friend in America named Julie Hill whom I have written about before, an old friend of our country and people. She turned ninety this past week, amid a host of personal challenges that come with age and with living alone. A prolific and published author whose books I edited, Julie was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and moved to the US for graduate school. She traveled and lived around the world, including Manila, with her late husband Arthur, and served as a multinational executive before retiring to Southern California. She has returned to the Philippines many times to visit with her old friends and quietly supports some private charities. 

When I last came to see her last year, despite her own mounting needs, she graciously donated a substantial amount to the University of the Philippines in aid of UP’s poorest students. Despite the entreaties of concerned friends, she refuses to be confined to a nursing home, preferring the company of her memories to the chatter of strangers. She can sometimes be lonely and fearful, but she is proud and brave, and the horizon she gazes at stretches far longer than we can imagine. I thought of writing her this birthday letter to cheer her on.

Dear Julie,

With your ninetieth birthday coming up in a few days, a lot must be going through your mind. I don’t know if your roses are blooming and your oranges fruiting outside your window, but I hope they are, because they always bring you joy and delight, of which our world is desperately short these days.

You have been around that world and have seen both the best and the worst of it. Over the five travel books and memoirs I have edited for you, you found kindness and humanity in the earth’s farthest reaches, and you singled out the Philippines for your warmest affections. Even before we met, you established lifelong friendships with many Filipinos, and continued to visit them and to maintain a special relationship with this place.

And thus you would have seen that the Philippines you knew half a century ago is far different today in many ways, yet unchanged in others. You came here with your husband Arthur, when the Ford Foundation sought to help Philippine education and rural development—priorities which remain unmet. Our population and our cities have grown far beyond their capacity to sustain a decent living. Manila now teems with tall buildings and sleek condominiums, at the literal feet of which the hovels of the poor abound, a cliche we’ve become inured to, and accept as God’s design. We breed children we can barely feed, who can’t read, who seemed doomed to servitude.

Your generous donation to the University of the Philippines, meant to help the poorest of UP students complete their studies, will provide some much-needed hope and relief. While intervention at the college level is often too late for these children, your support, and that of others, gives them a fighting chance. Beyond external assistance, we need massive educational reform, which will require a singular and strategic will on the part of our government to invest in our natural intelligence, before we even speak of AI and other shortcuts. Sometimes I think we need to love ourselves enough.

And so is America changed as well—no longer the welcoming sanctuary you found when you fled Nasser’s Egypt to study in Minnesota, but a paranoid society, hostile to foreign faces, accents, and ideas. You know this yourself, living in an affluent community whose manicured lawns are dotted with MAGA flags. I’ve met some of your neighbors over lunches in your home, and they’re very nice people, except for their politics, now explainable only in terms of mass hypnosis or idolatry. 

For how else could otherwise well-educated and upright citizens condone and even applaud a mad megalomaniac who starts a war without knowing why, delivering death and suffering the world over? What does it say of people happy to be led by a man utterly without morals, without conscience, and without compassion? Not long ago, with appalling but typical coarseness of spirit, this draft dodger publicly celebrated the passing of a combat veteran he saw as his enemy—an act of crass cowardice to which his followers turned a blind eye.

I’m reminded of those science-fiction movies from the 1950s, where your smiling, all-American neighbors turn out to be aliens beneath the skin, except that, ironically, today we are the aliens, to be excluded and exterminated by ICE, the American Gestapo.

I told you that I’ve sworn not to revisit the US until after Trump and his kind are banished from office, which makes me feel sorry that Beng and I might not see you again for some time, if ever again. The fare situation seems to have made that moot. The way things are going, we can’t even afford a flight down south, let alone across the Pacific. To all those MAGAs and Fil-Ams who tell us to butt out of US politics because it’s none of our business, well, here’s the g—d—n proof: never mind my bellyaching about plane tickets and all the nice beaches I’m missing out on; our jeepney drivers are plying the streets for 12 hours a day with tears in their eyes because they can’t even make enough to cover the gas they’re consuming, let alone pay their operator their “boundary” or daily minimum. When our oil supplies drain out in a few weeks, the agony will worsen. Beng and I will get past this—we’ve been through worse—but the suffering for many poor Filipinos will be incalculable.

I know that you, too, are suffering the aches and pains of old age, and that my periodic bouts with sciatica are nothing compared to yours. Twenty years ago when we first met we were still flush with energy and optimism, full of ideas about books to write and places to go. We wrote most of those books and followed our respective itineraries. When you come to think of it, we’ve led far fuller lives than most people can even dream of.

We can be thankful for the past and for the life partners we have been blessed to share this journey with. We could not have been more fortunate than for you to have had Arthur for half your life and  for me to have Beng for most of mine. But we are not quite done yet. 

We cannot let the bastards win. Our mission is to survive—and to survive them. If only for that, you have to live to 95, or even beyond that, and I have to do the same, so that we might, before finally exiting, regain our cheer, enjoy humor without irony, feel unmitigated joy. Be strong, be safe, and bask in the afternoon sun.

Affectionately,

B.