Category Archives: Education

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.

Qwertyman No. 188: Art Misappreciation

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Qwertyman for Monday, March 9, 2026

I TRY not to get triggered by everything I read on Facebook—half of which is probably fake or trash, but which we respond to all the same—but one recent post I just couldn’t ignore came from the Department of Education, happily announcing the removal of 15 core senior high school (SHS) subjects and their integration into five new “interdisciplinary” subjects. 

The subjects removed were Oral Communication; Reading and Writing Skills; 21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World; Media and Information Literacy; Komunikasyon at Pananaliksik sa Wika at Kulturang Filipino; Pagbasa at Pagsuri ng Iba’t-ibang Teksto Tungo sa Pananaliksik; Personal Development; Physical Education/HOPE; Statistics and Probability; Earth and Life Science; Physical Science; Understanding Culture, Politics, and Society; Contemporary Philippine Arts from the Regions; and Introduction to Philosophy of the Human Person.

They will be replaced by Effective Communication/Mabisang Komunikasyon; Life and Career Skills; General Mathematics; General Science; and Pag-aaral ng Kasaysayan at Lipunang Pilipino.

The rationale for the streamlining, says the DepEd, was that “Instead of treating the old core subjects separately, the revised core subjects integrate key competencies from related disciplines and will be offered across the entire academic year—supporting more sustained, in-depth learning and an interdisciplinary approach.”

That all sounds good on the surface—the word “streamlining” is one of those managerial buzzwords that instantly evokes efficiency, waste reduction, and forward movement—but I had to wonder at the wisdom of this decision, just looking, for example, at where the arts and culture will go under the new program, and how well they will be taught and learned under their new rubrics.

I can sense a general urgency to get the kids out of school sooner, to make them employable, and to get them employed. As it is, we already added two years with K-12 to their pre-collegiate education, with many parents, politicians, and even some teachers remaining unconvinced that those extra years were really necessary, given the added expense. I’m not sure if the reduction of 15 core subjects to five has budgetary implications, or was driven by them.

What worries me, going by the subject titles, is that once again, the arts (to include literature, music, dance, the visual arts, and art appreciation) are being subsumed into topics so broad that they will lose the specificity they require to make an impact and leave an impression on the student, to make it self-evident why the arts matter in human life.

I’ve often said in this respect that for far too long, the arts and culture have been treated by our government if not society in general as forms of entertainment, as intermission numbers to lighten the implicit gravity of business, politics, and science. (The guest of honor’s boring speech, following an equally long and tedious introduction, has to be framed by lively song and dance routines to awaken the audience.)

There’s value to that, of course—the ameliorative power of art is one of its primary functions—but as the dramatist will say, comedy is dead serious business behind the laughter. While science and math strive for certainty and precision, thereby addressing the best use of our increasingly limited resources, the arts remind us of our humanity—of our innate imperfections, of our capability to doubt, to weigh and choose between this and that, such as between self-interest and the collective good. 

That’s what happens when you read a good poem or novel or stand before a great painting: you begin to wonder more about yourself and your environment, about your standards of justice or beauty, about the distance between what should be or should have been and what is. Studying literature is about far more than learning communication skills (which you will, along the way)—it is, indeed, about “Life and Career Skills.” 

It is the arts that are inherently interdisciplinary; for example, when I discuss a short story by Manuel Arguilla, we will inevitably discuss history, geography, politics, economics, psychology, and language—while, at the same time, trying to understand the emotional experience we have just been put through. This is the specificity I mentioned earlier, which I fear will be lost in the abstractions of “interdisciplinarity.”

The EdCom II’s Final Report (Turning Point, 2026), where the SHS curricular changes are also noted, unfortunately sees this measure as mere “decongestion.” The report also tells us that the SHS streamlining will remove the dedicated Arts and Design track entirely as a recognized pathway. 

At this point, I’d like to borrow some words from a good friend and one of our leading arts educators, the sculptor Toym Imao, current dean of UP’s College of Fine Arts, who also pored over the EdCom II report and came away with these observations:

“Upon reflection, something becomes very clear to me. There is no substantial national discussion of arts and culture education. The absence is not minor. It reveals a blind spot in our imagining of national reform. Why does ACaD matter now?

“This is not nostalgia but strategy: in an AI-driven era, art, culture, and design are core competencies for critical thinking, ethical judgment, and human-centered innovation.

“We are living through a time of rapid technological change. Artificial intelligence is advancing faster than most institutions can process. Social media algorithms shape taste, identity, and even memory. Culture is packaged, flattened, and circulated at high speed. Labor markets are shifting. At the same time, we have the Creative Industries Development Act, Republic Act 11904, which positions creativity and culture as economic drivers, but sadly the EDCOM 2 reports is wanting in connecting this to urgent educational reform.

“As an artist and educator, I see what this means on the ground. Artificial intelligence systems are trained on massive global datasets that largely come from powerful nations and dominant languages. These systems are not neutral. They reflect the biases, priorities, and aesthetics of where they come from.

“In a country like the Philippines, with hundreds of distinct indigenous, regional, and linguistic cultures, this has consequences. If our own students are not deeply grounded in their cultural traditions, histories, and aesthetic languages, then what fills that space will be imported, automated, and algorithmically repeated. Without strong arts and culture education, cultural knowledge slowly thins out in global digital flows. Indigenous aesthetics risk becoming raw material for data, instead of living practices.

“Students become consumers of images and narratives without the tools to question them.

“In the studio and in the classroom, I see the difference. Arts education trains the eye, the hand, and the conscience. It develops judgment, sensitivity, context, and memory. It teaches students to ask where an image comes from, who it serves, and what it erases. These are not decorative skills. They are human skills.”

I can hardly overemphasize how important this is at a time when we are being roiled by massive corruption and when moral standards collapse or vanish to the point that a president can justify extrajudicial murder and be applauded by millions. A lesson in Greek tragedy is what you need for that.

Qwertyman No. 184: What I Told the Fil-Ams

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Qwertyman for Monday, February 9, 2026

LAST WEEK, at the Executive House of the University of the Philippines where he officially resides, UP President Angelo “Jijil” Jimenez graciously hosted a delegation of about twenty Filipino-American business and community leaders from San Diego, California, led by our honorary consul there, Atty. Audie de Castro. 

I was happy and proud to have helped facilitate this visit, having some close personal and professional ties myself to San Diego. Our unica hija Demi married a San Diegan, and has happily lived there with her husband Jerry for almost 20 years now. My wife Beng and I visit her nearly every year if we can afford it. 

San Diego also happens to be where a dear friend of mine, Mrs. Julie Hill, lives in a lovely home in Rancho Sta. Fe. Julie stayed in the Philippines for some years many decades ago when her husband was the Ford Foundation representative here and fell in love with the country and its people, and despite having traveled and served all over the world, the Philippines retains a special place in Julie’s heart. The last time I dropped in on her a year ago, Julie (who’s approaching 90) announced that she was donating what came out to more than P20 million to help the poorest of UP students. Atty. De Castro helped to formalize that donation as our consul in San Diego, cementing our relationship.

Professionally, but through Julie’s recommendation, I also served as Pacific Leadership Fellow in 2014 at the University of California San Diego, where I had previously lectured on Philippine-American affairs. Beng, meanwhile, observed operations and state-of-the-art techniques at the Balboa Art Conservation Center.

In other words, we’ve established rather close ties to this sunny and vibrant city in Southern California, where many generations of Fil-Ams have taken root, mainly because of the US naval base there, where thousands of Filipino sailors recruited from the Philippines have served. That’s how Demi’s in-laws came to San Diego from Bicol, their children born as Americans but deeply mindful of their Filipino heritage.

Many of our visitors never saw the Philippines until they were grown up, and I think most were setting foot on the UP campus for the first time. So we gave them the warmest reception and the best orientation we could, and engaged them over lunch in a lively discussion.

One of them asked: “What is the Filipino dream?” My UP colleagues responded to that in various ways, coming from different technical and academic disciplines. I tried to give a pedestrian answer: “The Filipino dream is actually a fairly simple one: a roof over one’s head, food on the table, a good education for the children, peace and justice in our communities. We dream for our families. But like all seemingly simple things, achieving that dream is difficult and complicated.”

The visitors had earlier asked President Jimenez about UP’s role in national leadership, and beyond citing how many presidents, senators, and Supreme Court justices we’ve produced—which, to be honest, has also contributed to the ruination of our nation—Jijil emphasized the value his administration places on service to the Filipino people, which can manifest even from beyond our shores. He spoke of UP sharing its knowledge and resources with other SUCs, of UP assuming its responsibilities as the country’s national university—a concept perhaps alien to the American situation but entirely relevant to ours. (I was aware, of course, that UP has many internal issues and priorities of its own to sort out—it always has, regardless of administration.)

A more challenging discussion was one that I had on the side with two ladies who admitted that they represented two ends of the American p0litical spectrum, but had managed to remain friends despite their differences. Their question for me was, what did I personally think of what was happening in America?

No longer in UP spokesman mode, I could have answered as bluntly as possible, but I wanted to give them the more nuanced answer their friendship deserved. 

I began by saying that I considered myself an exemplar of American colonial education, having gone to a private elementary school in the 1960s where I learned about “heifers” and “mackinaws” long before I ever got to see real ones, and even memorized American states and their capitals, to the dismay of my future American friends when we played Trivial Pursuit. I shed off much of the mystification as a student activist in the 1970s and took a far more critical view of the American influence over our history, economy, and politics. 

But the indoctrination was so effective that I retained a fundamental affection and even admiration for many aspects of American culture and technology, and maintained a lifelong and ultimately professional interest in the US. I studied and worked for five years in the Midwestern heartland, in Michigan and Wisconsin, I taught American literature—not just in UP but in America itself, to college students who seemed surprised that I seemed to know more about their country than they did. Not just because our daughter lives there, I continue to follow American affairs keenly, starting my day with the digital editions of the New York Times and the Washington Post (the latter now sadly degraded).

What I told them was that this America was no longer the America I once thought I knew and looked up to, despite its excesses. I said I thought I understood, at least in part, where MAGA was coming from, in the neglect of the American working class and their anxieties in a rapidly changed world. At the same time, Donald Trump had ridden on those grievances to empower and aggrandize himself and the billionaire elite, trampling on the very liberties that had once defined American democracy, imposing his racist and imperialist vision of America, and endangering global peace and security. The shootings in Minnesota were profoundly shocking and depressing. I said that as much as it saddened me, with loved ones in the US, I did not plan on visiting America again until this madness had passed. If even American citizens could be dragged by masked men into vans and summarily deported to El Salvador, then I did not want to risk an encounter with the American Gestapo.

I could have added that both Americans and Filipinos, as polarized as we have become, need to find some common ground, as we share problems that cut across our differences. Bu the time was short, and we sent our guests off with a smile.

Qwertyman No. 182: Artists, Athletes, and Avatars

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Qwertyman for Monday, January 26, 2026

SOCIAL MEDIA was abuzz last week with mainly praises for but also some questions about Hidilyn Diaz’s appointment to teach weightlifting at the University of the Philippines in Diliman. 

I don’t think anyone doubted the Olympic gold medalist’s mastery of her subject. One post that went viral, however, wondered whether the athlete had what it took to teach at UP, considering that all the preparation she would have received was a four-day orientation the university gives all new faculty members. 

To be fair to the questioner, her concern was legitimate, taking Hidilyn the sports celebrity out of the picture for a minute. As I’ll discuss later, proficiency in a talent or profession doesn’t necessarily translate to good teaching. 

To be fair to Hidilyn, unlike many Filipino athletes, she’s no stranger to the classroom, having graduated in 2023 with a bachelor’s degree in business management from St. Benilde, after several interruptions because of her training and the pandemic.

I have no doubt myself that despite her lack of teaching experience, Hidilyn will be a fine, welcome, and indeed a prize addition to the UP faculty roster. Her presence alone will galvanize student interest in her sport, and in UP athletics in general. 

Her teaching, I’m pretty sure, will take care of itself. Having trained with some of the world’s best coaches, she will not lack for topics and techniques. What will probably challenge her the most will be her transition from star to student—as the learner of teaching that she will have to be. Her students will have to get over their awe of her celebrity to imbibe her lessons. 

Her first year will be fraught with both exhilaration and frustration, as the enthusiasm and even the ecstasy of teaching are weighed down by the drudgery of academic bureaucracy—particularly in UP which, despite its leadership in many fields, remains a laggard in the prompt payment of salaries for new hires.

The fact that we’re even talking about this shows how far we’ve come from the past, when a good reputation was enough to get you in front of the blackboard.

The problem here isn’t Hidilyn, and not even just UP itself, but a global academic culture that seems to have been taken over by the accountants and professional managers from the dreamers. 

I have nothing per se against the numbers crunchers, who are central and vital to every modern university’s survival. But the seemingly ceaseless demand for performance metrics to justify budgets, promotions, and bonuses—a mind-numbing exercise for staff already exhausted from their regular chores—can produce a false dazzle that favors consistency of delivery and even of mediocrity over originality, non-conformity, and inspiration.

As a writer and also a professor and former university administrator myself, I can appreciate the peculiar challenges of recruiting and sustaining what we might call non-traditional academics like creatives and athletes in this kind of environment. You need them to identify and develop their successors among their students; conversely, many of them also need the security of a job. 

But teaching is its own art, its own sport, its own discipline—and I know, from sad experience, that not all artists and athletes, no matter how gifted they may be in their fields, can teach. Some lack the people skills and the empathy the classroom requires; the most expressive artists can be woefully inarticulate, the lithest athlete inexplicably clumsy. 

Those who do connect—performers who know their audiences and who value contact and feedback and continuous learning—become the best teachers.

Many of them might not even meet today’s stringent entrance standards. UP’s College of Science, for example and for good reason, now requires a PhD of its teaching applicants. The humanities and athletics obviously can’t enforce that rule, given that there are Literature PhDs who can’t write a decent poem and SportsEd PhDs who can’t swim.

On the other hand, some very fine writers have taught at UP without even a bachelor’s degree because of their extraordinary talent, notably NVM Gonzalez, IP Soliongco, Jose Lacaba, and Ricky Lee. 

This will be self-serving, but no better example of that kind of avatar exists at UP today than my wife June, who has been teaching the very first course in Art Conservation at the College of Fine Arts as a senior lecturer for the past three years.

Now 75, June came into teaching late in life, after a long career in the arts as a graphic designer, watercolorist, and for the past quarter-century as an art restorer and conservator running her own studio. Few people in this country (excuse the proud husband speaking) have her skill and experience, having worked on all the Filipino masters from Luna, Hidalgo, and Amorsolo onward, including the Spoliarium. She had always dreamt of teaching, knowing how few authentic and scientific conservators there are in the Philippines, and the need to train the young.

The only problem was, as a student activist, she had left UP under martial law a few units short of completing her Fine Arts degree. She married me, worked, became a mother, and never went back to school.

But she did train long and hard in conservation and restoration with the Agencia Internacional of the Spanish government, practically every day for a full year, in a program more rigorous than a master’s. On the strength of that training and her experience—she and her team have restored the collections of the Central Bank, the Philippine National Bank, and the GSIS, among others—she was taken in by UP to advise the administration on conserving the university’s vast art collections, leading to her appointment as lecturer (for a subject that, frankly, no one else in UP can teach right now). Aside from her classes, June has been advocating for UP to set up its degree program in conservation and an Arts Conservation Center to serve as both a teaching and service facility. She still runs her own Artemis Art Restoration company for private clients. For a 75-year-old dropout, that can’t be too bad. She complains of fatigue and of being perplexed by the world of AI, and says she wants to stop before dementia sets in, but I know her students love her and wish she would teach forever (because they tell her so).

I myself was a dropout for a decade and had worked as a journalist and screenwriter before returning to UP to finish my degree so I could teach—which I ended up doing for 35 years and still do long after retirement. 

When I think of Hidilyn Diaz coming in to UP amid all the fuss, I want to tell her to just relax, and to enjoy the campus and her students. Teaching in UP will be full of joys and aggravations, but the heaviest lifting will be within her—of doubts, fears, and the catcalls of the rabble in the bleachers. Welcome to the home of Honor, Excellence, and Service—and never mind that it also happens to be a hornets’ nest.

Qwertyman No. 180: Resolutions We Can Keep

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Qwertyman for Monday, January 12, 2026

ALMOST TWO weeks after the New Year, I’m sure many of us are still struggling with the resolutions we made—you know, the same ones we announced a year ago, like losing weight, buying no more (supply the object—shoes, watches, dresses), emptying the closet, and being nicer to (supply the officemate or in-law). I had to think that there must be resolutions we can make and actually keep—not easy or frivolous ones, but resolutions that will make a real difference in how we think, behave, and live. Here’s what I came up with:

1. I will not help spread fake news and hoaxes. Fighting for the truth begins with a healthy skepticism and the patience to verify. There’s no such thing as “harmless” fake news passed on. 

Last year I had to gently warn a score of friends—smart people with outstanding reputations—who posted on Facebook about Meta claiming the rights to their pictures and about pages turning blue (“It really happened!”) It’s a hoax that’s been going around for years, I told them; there was no such thing as the post described. What’s the harm, they said, just wanted to be sure. Well, the harm is in the propagation; every repost expands the space for fake news to grow, and the poster’s credibility only magnifies it further. That credibility also takes a hit, when it’s shown to absorb and help spread falsehood. Next time, visit a reputable fact-checker like http://www.snopes.com to verify a dubious post. The days are gone when you can assume that what you see is true unless proven otherwise; if you have to assume anything, assume the opposite.

2. I will think before I respond. I will reserve judgment until I understand the situation better, with clearer context and trustworthy and verifiable sources. It’s been said that today, especially online and on social media, people don’t read to understand, but to reply. Many of us have trigger itch—the compulsion to react to and comment on anything and everything that crosses our gunsights. And we do that literally without second thought, drawing on little more than scant knowledge and ample prejudice, and the unflinching conviction that we are right. 

The rise of the provocative meme—extremely compact and blunt, digitally manufactured to make a very specific point—has made this even easier, more efficient and more vicious. Memes eschew context, and invite uncritical concurrence. When I see a witty meme, I might smile and even smirk—but I will pause before joining a bashing spree if I have the slightest suspicion that something isn’t quite right. And while I’m at it, I will keep my sense of humor; I will not be baited or feel obliged to respond in anger, and I will remember that forbearance or silence is not surrender, but often victory.

3. I will use AI responsibly. I will use it as an assistant, but not let it do my thinking for me. I will use it to learn, understand, teach, and create. I will not use it to lie, malign, exaggerate, or aggrandize. I will not pretend to know everything AI can do or is doing. I will neither fear nor ignore it, but I will be wary—especially if what it produces is too clean, too good, or too intent to please. Truth often has rough edges that AI could polish out, like it enhances our portraits. 

I was watching a video on YouTube last week that purported to show the detailed production process by which the fashion house Hermes made its hyper-expensive and hard-to-get Birkin bag (am no fashionista, but am deeply curious about that industry’s workings). The video went to great lengths to demonstrate why the company’s bags commanded such high prices—the quality of the leather, the workmanship, the exclusivity—in purposeful contrast to the numerous fakes being made of the popular bag. But there was something about that video that made me uncomfortable—it seemed too luminous, its people too handsome, its tableaux too staged. An outdoor scene, supposedly outside the boutique, gave it away: the large shop sign clearly said HERMEES, with the extra E; it was no mistake—a few scenes later, they showed the sign again. The whole video was AI-driven, and no human seemed to be home and sharp enough to note the error. Now, its content may have been entirely factual, but its implied condemnation of fakery in business can’t possibly be helped by such a clumsy use of AI. 

4. I will not expect of others what I cannot expect of myself. This was something I learned during martial law, when I was imprisoned with all kinds of people—activists and common criminals, from both privileged and impoverished families. There and elsewhere, I saw how people who could speak so boldly and so well about revolution and liberty could break, sometimes so easily, under pressure. I witnessed and understood the marks of torture. I realized that everyone probably has a breaking point. I wondered what mine was. (My dentist would later tell me that I had a high threshold for pain, which surprised me.) But I came away thinking that if I asked another person to make an extraordinary sacrifice, it should be something I would be willing and prepared to do as well. I say this not to excuse weakness in other people, but to demand more of myself.

I will, however, hold public officials to a higher standard. They chose to lead—for which many are also handsomely rewarded—and so they must prove themselves better than the led. I have a right to expect that my President and congressman will act more wisely and more responsibly than me.

That said, I will live as honorably as I can, despite and especially because of the morally degraded environment in which we find ourselves today. I will not abet corruption in any way. This might be the hardest of all to keep, given how we have all somehow been complicit in this crime.

5. I will be more charitable, and share more of what I have. I will rescue “charity”—among the most human of values—from the political dustbin to which it has been relegated as useless and even harmful tokenism. I’ve heard too many people speak loudly and articulately about big themes like “social justice,” “Gaza,” and “anti-poverty” without yielding a peso from their own pockets or actually doing something concrete for the afflicted. Give, or serve. If you can’t change the system, change a life—you might even change yours.