Category Archives: history

Qwertyman No. 209: The Pinoy Odyssey

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Qwertyman for Monday, August 3, 2026

LONG BEFORE “The Odyssey” became a must-see movie thanks to the tempest of reviews surrounding Christopher Nolan’s highly publicized iMax version (and to get this out of the way, yes, I’ve seen it), it was a must-read book for us as literature majors, alongside its companion epic, the Iliad. I don’t recall whose translation it was we used, very likely Lattimore’s, but like most students, we were reading it for the story, and as these narratives are meant to do, that story stuck in the mind. That’s the function of myth, what I call the eternal past, a kind of memory that feels we’ve all shared in one way or another, even if we were never there, separated by millennia and thousands of miles.

I appreciated the tragic grandeur of the Iliad, which I would bring up in class when I needed to talk about how great heroes fall and about how the epic seems to glorify war and warriors but actually shows how war dehumanizes us. There are many compelling scenes and situations in the Iliad, but I’ve always found the Odyssey more fascinating because, as the Beatles might have put it, it’s a magical mystery tour that takes its hero to every distant shore except, finally, his home, and even when he gets there, it’s no longer what it used to be; home may be a fixed place in the map of the heart but it’s never static, never just as it was.

I’ve often used the character of Odysseus to describe the modern Filipino, especially in my lectures to foreign audiences (just as I would tell Americans that “We were your first Vietnam” to make sure they would sit up and listen). If the Filipino diaspora, in which a tenth of our population has embarked for the farthest corners of the world, isn’t an odyssey of truly epic proportions, then I don’t know what is. 

It isn’t the departure that matters as much as the homing instinct—the desire to come home, however long or how far away one has been gone, for whatever reason. I’ve yet to meet a Filipino abroad who didn’t want to come home, at least for a visit. When they can’t, Filipinos do their best to recreate home or some semblance of it wherever they are. One of my most touching discoveries was a bar named “Kabayan” in a remote corner of New Zealand, which was open even in the mornings for Pinoy sailors who happened to drift along.

In that sense, Jose Rizal was an early Pinoy Odysseus, traveling the world a century before his countrymen did so in droves, neither for war nor economic opportunity but for knowledge, a journey brightened by dalliances with this Circe and that Calypso. As did the original, Rizal came home to find the place badly out of joint, in dire need of reform (although “reform” seems a kind description of what Odysseus did to his wife’s suitors). The big difference, of course, is that in Homer, Odysseus emerges scarred but triumphant, reunited with his family, the beneficiary of a peace enforced by the gods; Rizal’s happy interlude in Dapitan, on the other hand, ends with a son who dies soon after birth, his abortive entry into a foreign war, and his arrest and execution in a domestic conflict.

Rizal’s novels left us with the figures of Crisostomo Ibarra and Simoun—both returnees from overseas, the former initially brimming with idealism, the latter consumed by retribution. That they are the same man speaks to the extremes in which we find ourselves pulled today by our politics, misty-eyed with patriotic fervor over Alex Eala and the West Philippine Sea, and yet deeply divided and darkly cynical when brought down to our immediate realities. 

A visiting professor and former colleague at UP’s English department, Dr. Gerald Burns, found that from Rizal onward, we Filipinos have produced a tradition of what Burns calls the “repatriate theme” in Philippine fiction, involving a hero-figure who goes for an extended stay abroad, perhaps for study or work or both, and then comes home with a “boon,” some social good picked up from that sojourn, to be shared with one’s people. The balikbayan is full of progressive ideas—could be from that newly minted PhD, or that stint in Silicon Valley, or that research laboratory in Germany—and thinks that he or she can illumine a benighted motherland with knowledge, only to realize that new ideas and their bearers are unwelcome, and that the path to progress and liberation is dark, narrow, and treacherous. There are no gods who will make things easy, punish evil, or rectify wrongdoing. The Pinoy Odysseus comes home to find Penelope defiled or worse, having abandoned him; his house is teeming with reptilian politicians feasting on what remains of his wealth. 

The Nolan movie divided audiences and critics with its liberal interpretation of whatever it was that Homer wrote (to sum up my own reaction, I found it entertaining but not particularly enlightening, as I—perhaps from my burdensome position as a writer and reader—kept expecting the script to rise to the occasion). Its best service to us as Filipinos may not be to revive our interest in Western classical mythology—although there’s value in regrounding the present century’s infatuation with Star Wars, Tolkien, and Game of Thrones—but to make us think about our sense of home, and why we keep coming back to a place we sometimes feel should be forsaken. Is our Ithaca worth the long journey across monster-infested lands and hostile oceans? Who and what is it that awaits us at our door?

(Rizal image from RizalsofAbra on IG)

Qwertyman No. 208: Now and Forever

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Qwertyman for Monday, July 27, 2026

 

LATER TODAY, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. will be delivering his fifth—and second-to-the-last—State of the Nation Address (SONA). In anticipation of that event, I got invitations from several media networks last week to talk about how SONAs get made, and what I expected BBM to say today.

The invitations were likely prompted by someone’s discovery that I used to be a presidential speechwriter—a title that sounds grander than the job itself, which of course is a privilege in some respects (and presuming your principal isn’t a crook, perhaps more honored in the breach) but also in others a crushing chore.

As I must’ve noted in this corner at some point, in a past life, I wrote or drafted speeches for five presidents since my early twenties—for Marcos Sr., Cory Aquino, Fidel V. Ramos, Joseph Estrada, and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo—but it was FVR whom I served the longest, and frankly with the greatest satisfaction.

I wrote more than 600 speeches for him as part of a small crew of speechwriters that worked quietly off-site—the so-called West Avenue outfit headed by the late Johnny Gatbonton, my model and mentor in the craft. We operated all those years far from Malacañang—a deliberate choice, to isolate and insulate ourselves from Palace intrigue.

We produced tons of material on demand—there were days when I would write four speeches for occasions as diverse as a bridge inauguration, the Famas awards, a peace agreement signing, and a vin d’honneur, with little to go on—not even Google in those pre-Internet days—but my own wits. And yes, my training as a writer of fiction surely helped, along with a diploma in Development Economics that I picked up along the way. We learned quickly, and we delivered. (I never met FVR as a client when I was writing for him, although ironically, as I’ve related before, he was the guest speaker at the TOYM and Palanca awards when I was an awardee—and yes, bizarrely, I got assigned to write his speeches for those events. I never introduced myself to him as his speechwriter until we met again for a book interview shortly before he died. We had a good laugh then.)

The year’s biggest job, of course, was the SONA. Like I told my interviewers, at least in my experience, no single writer writes the SONA. It takes a bureaucratic barangay to produce one, which probably explains the chop-suey character of certain SONAs you’ve heard. Normally, presidential speeches are produced by the Presidential Management Staff, and the executive departments submit their list of accomplishments to the PMS for consolidation and construction into a SONA. (Under FVR, these inputs ended up with us, although of course the President literally always had the last word.) The President—or his or her chief advisers—might come up with a central theme or slogan, around which the rest of the address could be organized. In 1993, for example, it was “a level playing field” for FVR; ten years later, GMA trumpeted her “strong republic.”

My own sense of a good or ideal SONA is one that’s focused, clear, easy to understand, sincere, and above all hopeful and inspiring. It’s a tall order amidst uncertainty and despair, but it’s precisely when times are bad that people need to hear a message of hope—one they can believe in or at least hold the President to, despite their doubts and misgivings. But that’s just me, as a writer looking for stylistic coherence and a Churchillian sort of impact and memorability, rather than a laundry list of X number of bridges built and Y number of tourists brought in. Leave that to a technical appendix.

The fact is that SONAs are constitutionally mandated documents, a report of an administration’s accomplishments provided as a matter of public accountability. It began in America with George Washington and now continues as the State of the Union (SOTU). For over a century from Jefferson onward, the SOTU became just a written report submitted to Congress; Woodrow Wilson revived it as a speech, thinking that a president had to be seen and heard by the people. We Filipinos took up the practice—and also constitutionalized it—in 1935, with President Quezon focusing presciently on national defense. (Interestingly, he spoke before a unicameral assembly—no senators to complicate life then for a brief interlude.)

It used to be that no one seemed really that interested in SONAs. Even on January 26, 1970, when as a sixteener I marched with thousands of other students outside the Legislative Building to protest Ferdinand Marcos’ SONA and thereby unwittingly helped trigger the tumultuous First Quarter Storm, we neither knew nor cared what FM was saying inside. Today people watch SONAs for the fashion show and for the inevitable mayhem outside the Batasan.

But last year, BBM dropped a bomb at the SONA that I suspect even he didn’t realize was going to be that big. His “Mahiya naman kayo!” broadside against corruption set off a further and indeed continuing series of explosions, all the way to the impeachment trial of VP Sara Duterte, as well as a Kanagawa-sized wave of expectations that now hovers over the last two years of his administration.

So what will or should BBM talk about this afternoon? My short list:

1. An acknowledgment of the economic crisis our people are suffering, and an announcement of meaningful measures to bring some relief. Talk about horrendous power bills, jeepney drivers pulling 16-hour days, seniors collapsing at ayuda lines: this is reality for most Filipinos today.

           2. An update on his professed campaign against corruption; what next after the ill-conceived and underpowered Independent Commission on Infrastructure? Corruption bridges economics and politics, with public money being used by and for political power. I doubt that BBM will directly address Sara’s impeachment—best for him to stay above it and let the prosecution do its job—but it remains a corruption and accountability issue, and should be taken in that context.

            3. A resolve to pursue these priorities over his last two years. He won’t and can’t use the word “redemption”—a mountain of skepticism still stands in his way there—but I’m sure he’s aware that people are watching what he’ll do next. In the end, it won’t be speeches but deeds that will make the difference—but as he learned last year, a few words can make big things happen. If I were the President—which every presidential speechwriter has to fearlessly assume for a few hours—the best way to think of the next two years is to think of forever.

               

               

               

               

               

               

              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. 205: Selective Religion

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              Qwertyman for Monday, July 6, 2026

              LET’S ASSUME that you’re one of the leaders—if not the Great Leader himself—of the Iglesia Ni Cristo (INC), with 3 million followers at your beck and call. You get word that one of your most prominent members, a sitting senator of the Republic, is going to be charged soon with plunder for admittedly pocketing P75 million in private donations without reporting it either as a campaign contribution or as personal income. 

              But you don’t bother yourself with the legal niceties of the case; they’re not important. What alarms you is the fact that one of your staunchest protectors—and not just of the INC, but of the Dutertes with which your church has cast its lot—is facing prison. It’s not the legal case, not a technical matter of proving plunder; while the senator himself seems to be taking things in stride, making noises about his willingness to go to jail, you know that it’s more existential than that. 

              It’s your own power that’s under threat, that’s being tested by the ingrate you helped to seat in the Palace. His presumptive successor, on whom you’ve bet all your marbles, herself stands to be impeached in the Senate for all manner of grave financial wrongdoing. You need your senator’s vote for her to escape the noose. Her once-formidable alliance is thinning by the hour—whether by their own commission (one has had to disappear to save his own neck, another is already in prison, also for plunder) or through deft politicking by unseen hands. 

              There could be more desertions down the road, as the impeachment trial starts this week. You know these characters; they’ve all come to you for your blessings, your quid for their quo, and you know how fickle allegiances can be, especially under pressure. But you have your own pressure to exert. You need to remind them of that cordial but heavily nuanced conversation in your office, of the vast difference 3 million votes can make in the senatorial tally. (More on this later, but let’s get on with our scenario.) So what do you do?

              You call the faithful out to the streets for a show of numbers, for the kind of visual impact that the network news and social media tend to magnify. You decide to hold this at the EDSA Shrine among other places for whatever symbolism it might carry, never mind that Mother Mary, so central to the EDSA spirit and experience, holds no special place of honor in INC belief. The night before, your organizers send out text messages ordering your people out to EDSA as early as 5 am; every “lokal” has to be represented. You know that you can rely on what your members have had ingrained into their minds and bodies: unquestioning obedience to authority. (Some of their T-shirts will declare this openly: “Obey and Never Complain”.)

              You beam with pride and pleasure as the crowds begin to gather at dawn, catching the drowsy city by surprise. You manage to choke off the city’s busiest and most important highway, convincing yourself and your own people that a day or two’s disruption of work and traffic is a mild inconvenience compared to the issue at hand. Ah, the issue—yes, let’s go with “selective justice,” which is clearly at work in the plunder case they whipped up against the good senator. Why him? Why now? What for? 

              This was the senator bravely threatening to unmask the biggest crooks in the highest echelons of government—never mind that he himself was now being unmasked for palpably gross misdeeds. You trot out a small parade of notoriously unsavory politicians—but then who else have you got?—to amuse the gathering. Never mind the irony of an Imee Marcos crying “Walang uwian!” at the very place that sent her and her family packing off for Hawaii forty years ago (we don’t know if she stayed the night huddling with the INC masses—or went home as senators are wont to do after their speeches). 

              Nowhere in this spectacle did God or religion visibly figure—what the INC’s conception of justice was, how the Dutertes and Marcoletas would spread God’s dominion over the earth, how individual INC members (especially senators) were supposed to discern right from wrong except by executive fiat, and how the reported INC practice of cornering certain lucrative government posts after elections fulfills God’s mandate. 

              Sure, they can fill up streets, and hold parts of a city hostage for a few days. They can make it look like they centrally matter, and perhaps in some swing situations they do, as did the support they allegedly threw behind Bam Aquino last year. 

              But here’s the bottom line. The INC’s reputed 3 million members comprise voters and  non-voters including children. Studies put the real number of voting INC members at less than 1.4 million, and even less in terms of who actually shows up at the polling booths. SWS chair emeritus Mahar Mangahas puts it at “around 5 percent” of all voters. 

              Do they vote as a bloc? Yes—but not absolutely. The 2016 TV5-SWS Exit Poll showed that 77.2 percent of INC voters supported Rodrigo Duterte. SWS data also indicate that  around 20 to 25 percent of INC voters do not vote for church-endorsed candidates. So 75 to 80 percent do vote by command—but whether they do so because of obedience or because the INC tends to endorse popular candidates has yet to be determined. So the discipline and the reliability are there to some extent, but it’s a power that can be easily overstated and just as easily abused.

              The greatest damage wrought by the INC in its EDSA excursion was neither to the traffic situation and much less to the case against Sen. Marcoleta. It was to its own image as a religious faith to be taken seriously as such, a body of belief driven by godly wisdom. By consistently supporting morally compromised politicians, it has revealed itself as a political instrument, manipulable and deployable, for reasons and purposes known only to its leaders. 

              And that’s sad because I do have some INC friends, upright people for whom I have a deep respect, and whom I would be glad to hear from on the issues I raised above. I’ll promise them fair representation in this space—but they’ll have to speak for themselves and not their leaders, to the extent that that’s even possible.

              Qwertyman No. 201: Insenaty

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              Qwertyman for Monday, June 8, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

              Qwertyman No. 200: The Training of Leaders

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              Qwertyman for Monday, June 1, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

              Qwertyman No. 199: Making It about Themselves

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              Qwertyman for Monday, May 25, 2026

              NEVER IN our political history has a sitting Senate been held in such disrepute, been so reviled in public opinion than over the past two weeks. You’d think that the outrage over the leadership coup couldn’t be topped, but then came the obviously staged shooting and a fugitive’s escape—and then a lady senator’s histrionics over that fake attack.

              What sticks in the craw—at least in mine—isn’t even the leadership turnover, or the assisted escape. We saw those coming, and even if we didn’t, they make cynical sense; of course they would do it. What’s extremely galling was having to listen to Pia Cayetano’s pained depiction of herself as a victim in the whole affair, terror-stricken and forlorn. 

              Even accepting that her fear may have been genuine, she sounded shrill and shallow, peevish and petulant, completely unmindful of the deeper and more harrowing terrors ordinary Filipinos—people without staff, security, bulletproof SUVs, and generous salaries—have suffered, with far more courage and even grace. 

              Terror and fear are givens in this country. Like many others of my age, I was shot at during the First Quarter Storm—at the Diliman Commune and at any number of rallies disrupted by the police and military. During martial law, I was beaten up as a political prisoner. Later, our home was raided early one morning by military agents hunting down “subversives” they thought were there, and our four-year-old daughter was interrogated by them. They were traumatic at the time, but they were nothing compared to the unspeakable torture my friends and comrades went through, the horrible deaths others suffered, the grief and loss sustained by those left behind. 

              Multiply that by many thousands, not just under Marcos Sr. but under Rodrigo Duterte, and you’ll know what true terror feels like. Heard shots two doors down the hallway? Scary, yes, but Sen. Pia’s histrionics should have been directed at her mates who failed to warn her of the plan to spring Bato, which evidently at least some of them knew.

              Pia Cayetano’s outburst, Robin Padilla’s posturing, Bato de la Rosa’s pop-up show, even Allan Cayetano’s propensity to fall on his knees and raise his arms to heaven—all gestures they had to know would only raise the political temperature—display a skill mastered by politicians, usually those with skeletons to hide: making it all about themselves, employing theatrics and embracing notoriety, effectively deflecting attention from the larger issues at hand.

              What we’ve seen is but a preview of the spectacle to come. We can expect even more drama at the impeachment trial itself, on and off the Senate floor. More tears, more swearing, more gnashing of teeth, maybe even a scuffle or two. The public expects it, the theater of the Senate will provide it. 

              It will become obvious at some point that it will no longer be Sara Duterte on trial, but the Senate itself—its credibility, its viability, and ultimately its utility and necessity as a political institution.

              It should probably be clear by now that if we just go by the present numbers, VP Sara Duterte’s impeachment is dead in the Senate, was dead before it even started. More optimistic observers have opined that a conviction remains possible if some senators are persuaded—whether by the evidence or the pressure of public opinion—to change their minds, or even somehow vanish. 

              I myself think that while a few conversions can be secured, the nine votes needed to keep Sara free and happy are locked in place. The shamelessness with which the current majority pulled off their coup on the eve of the impeachment court’s convening shows that these people are prepared to do anything—to run the country to the ground if necessary—to save their skins and even prosper again under a Sara administration. 

              We Pinoys have hurtful words for this—walanghiya, kapal-mukha—and they’ve made the rounds of social media many times over, but these people are beyond hurting, impervious to all injury but to their power and their pockets.

              These are the robed jurors who will sit through VP Sara’s trial and listen stoically to the litany of evidence detailing her crimes, none of which will matter to them. They will brazen it out to the end, confident that a resurgent Sara will rescue their political fortunes, and that a forgetful people will restore their reputations. They have no respect for the people’s intelligence, expecting us to swallow the preposterousness of these claims:

              1. That the timing of the Senate leadership coup had nothing to do with the impeachment trial of VP Sara Duterte;

              2. That Allan Peter Cayetano and Co. had no foreknowledge of Bato de la Rosa’s appearance at that key Senate session;

              3. That the shooting incident had nothing to do with the escape of de la Rosa from the Senate with the assistance of Robin Padilla;

              4. That no one in the Senate majority knew or knows of fugitive de la Rosa’s whereabouts.

              And that’s why I can safely predict that no matter what they throw at her at the approaching trial, VP Sara’s hardcore Group of Nine—which will likely remain intact regardless of whether Sen. Sotto et al regain leadership of the Senate, as some expect to happen before too long—will guarantee her acquittal. If they think we can believe these fictions—or worse, don’t give a damn about what we think—then they’ll give Sara (and thereby themselves) a pass. That’s impunity on another level. 

              Sen. Pia’s flare-up was reportedly provoked by Sen. Risa Hontiveros’ remark that it seemed that “nothing happened”—“walang nangyari”—in the wake of the Senate shooting. “But something did!” Pia insisted. 

              I hope we can say the same at the end of the impeachment trial, but I’m not holding my breath. Against all my hopes, I’m afraid that walang mangyayari, and there’ll be at least nine senators who won’t be the least bit bothered.

              Qwertyman No. 198: A Refuge of Scoundrels

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              Qwertyman for Monday. May 18, 2026

              THE MINUTE I saw the news on my phone last week that a Senate coup had just taken place with 13 senators voting to replace Tito Sotto as Senate President, I felt overcome by physical revulsion, like I wanted to throw up. Abysmal as it already is, Philippine politics had reached a new low. 

              Democracy and justice had once again been hijacked by a crew of shameless opportunists whom we are paying P300,000 a month, plus many millions more in other emoluments, to screw us. Apart from funding this whole production, the Filipino people were fed a poorly scripted smoke-and-mirrors drama involving the surfacing of a fugitive from justice (or a ghost employee) for the sole purpose of casting one crucial vote, and then spiriting him away under a hail of bullets and hysterical screams of “We are under attack!”

              I’m normally a pretty placid and I think level-headed person, mistrustful of conspiracies and averse to violence. But I have to admit, Father forgive me, that on that particular day I wished the attack were real—not to kill anyone but to strike fear into the hearts of politicians who’ve become impervious to the people’s wrath. I know, I know, it’s a sick and desperate idea, and as I’ve said before, nothing good ultimately ever comes out of violence. 

              Still—and seriously now—it’s happened before, with deadly consequences, and not always for the right reasons. The most famous case was that of the five Puerto Rican nationalists who fired on members of the US Congress from the gallery while it was in session in 1954, injuring six, in their bid for Puerto Rican independence. Much worse, in 1993, Russian President Boris Yeltsin himself ordered the army to attack the parliament when it voted to remove him from office, resulting in almost 200 deaths around Moscow. The infamous January 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol by a MAGA horde egged on by Donald Trump to foil Joe Biden’s proclamation was responsible for at least five deaths and many more casualties, not the least of which was American democracy itself.

              In a saner frame of mind after many deep breaths, I’ll say that we’re not quite there yet with our legislature—the lower half of which at least performed its constitutional duty by impeaching a patently corrupt Vice President. His denials notwithstanding, new Senate President Alan Peter Cayetano knows very well in his bones—he should, at least during those photogenic moments when he falls on his knees to implore Divine Wisdom—that the impeachment and all the political and economic fortunes that ride on it were behind the coup. 

              The second and crucial Senate phase of that hearing was due to begin today, May 18, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, under Cayetano, some issue (like the fitting of jurors’ robes and such) were to be raised to delay it further. After all, they now have the Supreme Court’s blessings to stretch “forthwith” from here to eternity, way beyond the limits of the people’s patience. I hold no high expectations for this trial, because if Cayetano’s bloc of 13 (or even make that 12) were to hold throughout, no amount of factual evidence will matter, at which point only some form of divine justice will save our democracy.

              Indeed it may be time to revisit the wisdom of having a Senate at all, with such abundant proof of its profligacy, obstructionism, and opportunism. Its new and yet unfinished building alone—now reported to cost P30 billion, or ten times its original estimate—stands as a testament to wasteful folly, especially in the light of the privations ordinary citizens are going through in this period of economic crisis. There is nothing this Senate can do that a unicameral, party-based legislature can’t, and even if we keep electing the same set of crooks and jokers, at least it will be cheaper to maintain.

              True, there are a few good men and women in the Senate who deserve their salaries and our continued support and respect. They now remain to mirror the conscience of the nation, to speak the truth to the record and for posterity. But they can also perform just as well in Congress, unless we elevate them to higher office. While in the Senate, they should stand their ground and refuse to validate such a spurious privilege as “protective custody,” which a despot like former President Rodrigo Duterte would have ignored without second thought. (He had even, let’s not forget, threatened to imprison senators in 2021 if they cited his Cabinet members for contempt.)

              And what of the hapless and seemingly clueless Marcos administration? What has happened to the trillion-peso infrastructure mess, to the giant web of corruption that even the Sara Duterte impeachment is but a part of? If it were as driven and as inventive as its DDS adversaries, it could at least allow Bato de la Rosa to sneak out of hiding through his military and police connections and board a waiting plane (along with a mustachioed senator, please)—and then divert the plane to the Hague.

              Senates and legislatures, of course, have never been havens of virtue. The Roman Senate was particularly notorious. Not only did over 40 senators stick a knife into Julius Caesar in 44 BC; even earlier, in 133 BC, senators murdered the tribune Tiberius on Capitoline Hill for proposing to give land to the poor—land that would have belonged to the patrician solons. The emperor Caligula thought so poorly of the Senate that he was said to have nominated his favorite horse Incitatus to become consul—effectively, Senate President. At least the Romans would have had a prized stallion to lead them; here we have asses.

              “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” wrote Samuel Johnson in 1775, and today, it’s the Philippine Senate that best lays claim to that distinction. Not all of those scoundrels are even fugitives.

              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.”