Category Archives: Society

Qwertyman No. 215: Crimes and Punishments

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Qwertyman for Monday, September 14, 2026

BACK IN the early ‘90s, I wrote an essay titled “Killing Time in Little Earth,“ in which I noted that “In the Philippines, we have crimes and punishments aplenty, but they have very little to do with each other.” I don’t think much has changed in thirty years, as recent events amply demonstrate.

For example, what it is about impending imprisonment that makes corrupt but otherwise bouncy politicians and officials suddenly acquire some debilitating disease that obligates their solitary confinement not in prison but in some swanky hospital suite?

Our prisons are bursting with inmates afflicted by tuberculosis, gastroenteritis, hepatitis, HIV, and host of other crippling ailments. But none of these inmates get the executive suite, and not everyone gets the treatment they need, if only because our jails are almost 300% congested, according to the BJMP’s own figures. Even if prison hospitals exist, they simply can’t keep up with the cases coming in; they’re swamped, and whoever they can’t serve go back into their overcrowded cells, carrying all kinds of communicable diseases. 

We’ve seen this happen so often here that it might as well be part of the official script: “Public officials above Salary Grade 30 charged with plunder will be subjected to a mandatory initial period of hospital confinement for a minimum of three months and to last no longer than the prescribed punitive period for their offense, during which extensive medical procedures will be undertaken to ensure the patient’s good health and fitness for prospective incarceration. Quality and substantial nutrition shall be provided, along with adequate recreational facilities for the patient’s physical and mental well-being. All this shall be at the state’s expense.”

These country-club habitues and their blue-chip physicians have been known to spin tall tales about how they suddenly acquired hypertensive atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, osteoarthritis, respiratory ailments, and degenerative disc disease, to name the most popular diagnoses.

But to be fair, this epidemic of hospitalitis has been a global phenomenon. The Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, arrested in Britain, escaped repatriation and certain imprisonment for six years by reportedly feigning mental incapacity. He was later returned to Chile and charged with many crimes, but ultimately escaped judgment by dying before he could be convicted. Former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, convicted of corruption, spent half of his one-year sentence in a Bangkok hospital before being kicked out by their Supreme Court for malingering. He would get in and out of jail more times since then. So politicians and despots find clever ways of replacing steel bars with green curtains, and justice often has to wait in the hallway while they take their time to recover.

Speaking of tall tales…. All this reminds me when, as an aspiring academic seeking relief from Manila’s infernal heat and university politics, I once found myself in a northern hillside village populated mostly by decrepit seniors. A young man there was causing mayhem with all kinds of vile rumors and fiendish schemes, gleefully hurting his elders without compunction for the sheer delight of watching them suffer, as if he hated what he was fated to become. How could someone so juvenile be so evil? 

A community council was called, to which I was invited as an honored guest. I would have been happy to observe the proceedings from a corner, but they sat me in a tall chair beside the village chief and handed me a bamboo cup filled with potent bugnay wine.

It was suggested, only half in jest, that this pest be disposed of as efficiently as possible, such as by driving a stake between his shoulder blades when he was squatting by the river to pollute the flow downstream. 

A heavily tattooed councilwoman less inclined to brute violence proposed instead that they approach the village shaman to lay a curse on the fellow, so that he would retch uncontrollably every time he did so much as utter a mean word, and grow pus-filled blisters between his legs whenever he mentioned the name of a specific villager who seemed to be the prime object of his mischief.

But then the chief turned to me, as the visiting writer and professor from the city, to ask me for my erudite opinion. Surprised but pleased to be consulted, and emboldened by the bugnay, I got up from my chair, thought hard, put on my sagest and most benign countenance, and drew on my command of fiction to offer counsel:

“O most noble chief, tell him this—you are cursed by the power of Fata Morgana! Fa-Tah Mor-gan-ah! Then turn your back on him—like this!—and leave him be to wonder what the curse entails. I trust life’s natural trajectory to bring him down to a deep dark valley where he will feel as much pain and misery as he is causing now. It happens to everyone. But for most of you here, having lived this long, that moment is surely behind you. For him, the worst yet to come, and he will not even know from where it will descend or arise. He will live the rest of his life in constant dread and anticipation of heaven’s inevitable retribution in some frightful form.”

I had to leave right after that to catch a bus to get to a beach resort in La Union before the sun set, pleased that I had contributed some paltry but precious wisdom to the community. The curse I conjured charmed me; I admired the uncertainty of the specifics against the certitude of the outcome.

But I later learned, in a long text message from the comely barangay nurse whom I had befriended in my first hour there, that the council had pondered my advice for about two minutes, and then, when my bus turned the corner toward the national highway, had deputized someone to whack the fellow over the head with a shovel hard enough to make him a slobbering fool forever. 

He injured no one after that, and the villager he had most maligned was kind enough to daily feed him leftovers from the pig trough with a hard wooden spoon, followed by a cool gulp of soapy dishwater, so he must have lived a reasonably long life. I never knew if he reached that low valley I predicted, but I think the plains were punishment enough.

Qwertyman No. 214: Achieved, But Not Aspired For

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Qwertyman for Monday, September 7, 2026

WITH THE announcement last week of its three new laureates for 2026, the Ramon Magsaysay Awards Foundation (RMAF) once again drew attention to that transcendent quality so sorely lacking in our public life today: “greatness of spirit,” the standard by which RM awardees are measured—a greatness achieved, but not aspired for.

This year’s awardees exemplify that spirit abundantly.

Twice imprisoned by Burma’s military junta for his work in the resistance, Bo Kyi fled to Thailand after his second release in 1998. But rather than simply fend for himself or seek a new life away from politics, Bo Kyi met with his fellow refugees and organized the the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), on the founding principle that “As long as political prisoners exist inside Burma, Burma will not be free.”  

The AAPP documents these prisoners—it’s estimated that since 2021 when the military regained power in a coup after a brief civilian interlude, the junta has arrested over 30,000 people, releasing only half of them. As many as 100,000 may have been killed.

It is against these atrocities that Bo Kyi and the AAPP are crying out and mobilizing, providing support to the prisoners and their families, and raising the situation in Myanmar to global attention, knowing that the Burmese people are hardly alone in their plight. Honoring him, the RMAF board of trustees said that “His enduring commitment reflects extraordinary moral courage, personal sacrifice, and an unwavering belief that democracy and human dignity are always worth defending—and that even in the face of oppression, the truth must be told, justice must be pursued, and the freedom to believe must be upheld and defended at all costs.”

The second awardee could not have been more different from Bo Kyi in her circumstances. Born to a family of privilege in Bangladesh, Runa Khan (not to be confused with the movie star of the same name) could have remained in what she calls a “glass bubble”—but instead she chose to immerse herself in the lives of Bangladesh’s poorest and most vulnerable communities, the dwellers of the char.

In Bangladesh, chars are essentially temporary islands or sandbars formed by deposits at the delta of the country’s three great rivers—the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, and the Meghna. While these rivers give the country life, they also, along with the sea, bring terrible floods and disasters. Thus, literally and figuratively, the char people live on shifting sand, ever subject to the vagaries of the weather and climate change, and largely neglected by everyone else.

Runa stepped in to help meet their needs—first, with a hospital ship in 2002. But realizing the challenge was far too great to be met alone, she organized an NGO named Friendship Bangladesh to bring social services, education, and employment to the char, and thereby also dignity and hope to its people. The RMAF trustees noted that “In her hands, privilege became not an entitlement, but a responsibility; not a family legacy to protect, but a gift to be shared.”

The third honoree comes from a small Southeast Asian country now associated with wealth and influence, but when Tommy Koh was born in 1937, it was far from that, a colonial backwater with no mind or destiny of its own. Over his lifetime, Tommy would see all of that change—and be part of the change himself, articulating Singapore’s voice and vision at the United Nations as its youngest ambassador at 29.

That exposure would lead to larger and more significant contributions for Koh in international affairs—most especially in what we now know as the Law of the Sea, which he helped to nurse within the UN from a negotiating committee he chaired in 1978 to its adoption as a UN convention in 1982. This law is what maritime countries such as the Philippines are now holding on to in their definition and defense of their territorial waters, especially against the encroachments of larger and more powerful nations.

But beyond diplomacy, Tommy Koh has made sure that a new generation of Singaporeans could take over from where he and his peers have left off, through legal education and through his many advocacies, which include the rights of the disabled and even animal welfare. The Magsaysay trustees observed that “Through his steadfast faith in dialogue, the rule of law, and international cooperation, he has helped make peaceful coexistence possible in a world of unequal power.”

There are good reasons why the Ramon Magsaysay Awards—unlike even the Nobel Prize to which it is often compared—studiously avoid serving politicians when it considers possible laureates. Foremost, I would surmise, is that politicians are elected and paid to serve, so that whatever great social good they do was exactly what they promised and signed up for, and doesn’t need to be rewarded. 

It’s a sign of the times that as soon as I say this, some worthy Filipino politicians leap to mind, basically because they are exceptionally honest, hardworking, intelligent, and selfless—qualities which, come to think of it, should be par for the course, but now so rare that we feel blessed to find even just a few still standing upright in a pit full of reptiles and roaches. So shamelessly hungry for recognition are these lower creatures that they plaster their names and faces on billboards for projects they probably stole from, and yet so dense and dislocated that they would wear designer outfits to flood-relief sorties. 

Measure that against the Magsaysay awardees—and yes, Ramon Magsaysay himself—and understand why we Filipinos continue to be hounded by injustice, poverty, and despair (not to mention flash floods). If there’s a Pinoy out there with the greatness of spirit to keep our poorest safe, dry, and amply fed in this season of storms, he or she would be my next nominee for the Magsaysay, with possible sainthood to follow.

(Photo from news9live.com)

Penman No. 213: The Age of Flex

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Qwertyman for Monday, August 31, 2026

“FLEX” IS a word I began hearing a few years ago from millennial and Gen Z speakers, and it quickly became clear to me that it had acquired a new meaning beyond the way we oldies had always understood it, i.e., in the sense of flexing your muscles so they stand out. Not all that different, really, but more deliberate and more intense: to flaunt, to show off, to rub your goodies in someone’s face. (As it turns out, upon further study. “flexing” this way was already part of gangster rap at least thirty years ago, and as many counterculture words do, slid into the mainstream.)

Whatever, we Filipinos seem to have embraced flexing with a passion, equating it with Pinoy pride in all its exuberant if not extravagant manifestations, from Eala-mania and the next Miss Universe to Michelin-worthy adobo and the Filipino gene in this and that Hollywood star.

That’s all well and good, as Lord knows we need something to cheer and crow about, with all the political and economic depressants we’ve been imbibing. 

Every time I hear the Hon. Robinhood Padilla saying something—anything—I become more convinced that AI will prevail and rule the world, and we may even welcome it, if Robin’s brain—and those of the millions who put him where he is—were to be the standard for human intelligence, as some visiting Martian might surmise. (But wait: isn’t “artificial intelligence” in fact what the good senator possesses in spades?)

I’m sure Sen. Padilla feels he’s flexing something—his wit, his confidence, his irresistible appeal?—when he strides up to that podium sporting that “I know you think I’m dumb, but I’m going to outsmart you” grin. If his charm seems to be lost on doubters like us, that means nothing, because he’s not performing for us but for his faithful, whose adulation for their hero is merely amplified by every brickbat thrown his way. He may, for all we know, even be a lot smarter than we think, may be quietly reading up on algorithms and Habermas over coffee in some Jollibee before sneaking into the Senate to put on his bumpkin act. He’s flexing his acting, his ability to enthrall his audience with his pilosopo character, who pretends to look and sound stupid while nursing some deep-seated truth that every Juan and Juana grasps except all those JDs and professors of Law.

This past month brought some other, far less subtle examples of Pinoy flex. 

At his confirmation hearing, Air Force reservist Brig. Gen. Mikee Romero’s “fruit salad” made an active general’s shirtfront look like plain buko pandan, setting off a storm of outrage and wonderment over how a sitting politician could amass such miraculous medals in much shorter time than it took a serving soldier to dodge a bullet and leap into a foxhole. “I never asked for them,” he declared in self-defense while abruptly announcing his retirement, for which candor I daresay he deserves another Congressional Medal of Candor, at least for confirming how the system works: I get you your choppers, you give me a chestful of chopped oranges and pineapples.

But who needs wearable baubles when you can actually drive one? Businessman AJ Violago must have thought the world was his oyster (or Boxster—or Spyder) when he got the keys from his friend the actor Derek Ramsay to go zoom-zoom in a pricey Porsche and, while he was at it, tack on custom license plates with his initials to show who was Spyder-Man. Unfortunately the caper backfired, revealing not only AJV’s folly but someone’s forgetfulness as well in the amount of PXX million in unpaid customs duties. The 918 has been impounded and will be auctioned off to recover that money, so Derek and his friend can at least take comfort in having indirectly contributed to mitigating the Philippines’ P7.2-trillion budget for 2027. 

And since we Pinoys love prizes and recognition so much, let’s give the 2026 GMA “I Am Sorry” Award (in honor of the former President, for exemplary albeit dubious acts of contrition) to Dimasalang National High School Principal Randy Emmanuel Bulanon, who gleefully attacked Atty. Jesus Falcis, Rep. Percy Cendaña, and Rep. Chel Diokno for everything from their sexuality to their buck teeth. After the inevitable backlash—including the threat of legal and administrative charges and possible dismissal from the service—Bulanon took down the posts and released a lengthy apology, wishing that he had “exercised greater prudence, restraint, and discernment… especially considering my responsibilities as a school principal.” 

I want to show these messages—Bulanon’s original posts, and the letter of apology—to my students in Professional Writing, to ask them which they thought were more personal and sincere and therefore believable, and which may have been AI-generated. It may not matter in the legal sphere where this now all seems headed, but it’s interesting to see where the truth recedes and what takes over when survival’s at stake. (When I look at the “letter of support” circulating on Bulanon’s behalf trumpeting his achievements as an educator, all my AI flags go up, from language to structure.)

Runner-up honors go to Danao City teacher Zenith Enriquez who threatened to shoot presidential spokesperson Claire Castro in the mouth. When netizens recoiled—and Castro threatened to sue—Enriquez said sorry and pleaded for the bashing to stop, because her children were now bearing the brunt of the backlash. Now, I don’t care if you’re DDS, pro-BBM, or as pink as a baby’s butt; but maybe next time, you should keep your lips zipped and look at your kids first before you make that stupid post, because the comeback could be far worse than more words thrown your way.

Confucius could have flexed about all the government positions he held and the rulers into whose ears he whispered. Instead he wrote sobering lines like “The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions.” And that’s why we remember him more than all those emperors in their fancy tombs.

Qwertyman No. 212: Better than AI

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Qwertyman for Monday, August 24, 2026

MY RECENT column about my plans to harness AI in my Professional Writing class at the University of the Philippines provoked so many inquiries and reactions that I thought I’d share more of my ruminations, preparatory to a lecture on AI and writing that I’m scheduled to give at a conference in November. Feel free to disagree with and to interpellate me—some statements I’ll be making here might sound contradictory or even outrageous to some good people out there—so I can refine my arguments further. 

I’ll begin with the observation that the eminently practical Singaporeans have a strategic plan for promoting AI literacy toward what it calls “AI bilingualism,” i.e. domain expertise plus AI fluency. They don’t think AI should be taught as a separate course but embedded into what people are already doing. Citizens above 25 can avail themselves of free six-month subscriptions to AI apps. Singapore also hosts data centers under very strict conditions.

Can and should we go Singapore’s way? We’re still embroiled in the question over whether to allow a big data center like Pax Silica in—and rightly so. There are many key technical and ethical issues to sort out having to do with resource demands, legal frameworks, and people’s rights. 

That said, the realist in me expects that AI will be here to stay, whether we host it or not, like it or not, and there have audibly been many of those “nots” lately, in both public forums and social media. 

I can understand and respect this resistance. As an education professor studying AI reminds us, skepticism isn’t ignorance. It isn’t just technophobia; adopting AI isn’t as simple as getting used to a VCR, a cellphone, or even the Internet. Rejecting AI doesn’t mean you’re a Luddite, or you don’t understand algorithms, LLMs, and whatever it is they’re gushing about as though the heavens had parted and God’s open palms came out of the clouds showing “A” and “I.” I can see why even tech-savvy writers and artists will refuse to use it in their work on principle.

I myself use Claude in my nonfiction mainly to organize material, but beyond Google, I certainly won’t employ it in my fiction, precisely because I’m doing my best to avoid being predictable, which AI is in a sense all about.

(Am I not horrified by that image of Anthropic’s machine chopping up and digesting books for AI’s training? As an author and antiquarian book collector, of course I am. Will my outrage move the needle? Not by one degree; the harvest will continue, and its output will be so homogenized that we’ll be using it without knowing it. I think the original travesty, if you will, happened when those billions of trees were pulped and fed to the paper mills and printing presses so we could publish our precious books—but of course we don’t think of it that way.)

That doesn’t mean that in the future, writers and artists of unimpeachable integrity can’t or won’t find ways of integrating it organically into their work. It’s scary to contemplate, but AI will mutate to a point of familiarity and trustworthiness that it will be near impossible to deny or to ignore. Taking a page from physics, the controversial but eerily prescient futurist Raymond Kurzweil has anticipated a crucial juncture called “the Singularity,” when human and artificial will merge, likely through nanotechnology, and even boldly gives a date when that will happen: 2045. I’ll be long dead by then, so I’m not even going to worry about its implications.

But I will predict that in the lead-up to that point, at least in publishing, three streams will emerge. At the top tier will be 100% human-written books, which will come at a premium though not necessarily sell better (as it is, right now, many if not most such books don’t sell, anyway). In the middle will be hybrid human/AI work—the new and intriguing frontier we have yet to explore, which will be initially met with distrust if not disdain, but will come into its own. At the bottom rung will be 100% AI-generated work, especially popular fiction, produced by skilled prompters working for publishers who will be paying them no royalties. 

As I’ve often asserted, the notion that “human is always better” simply isn’t true. To begin with, the world is full of brutish, stupid, and even murderous people for whom the word “humanity” seems purely a biological description; granted, some such ogres become great artists, but the world is also full of kind, smart, and pleasant people who can’t write or draw for the life of them. 

In other words, the bar is so low that AI doesn’t have to do very much to surpass human capabilities. It can’t out-write Shakespeare or maybe even the class genius, but it surely can compose a better business letter than most ordinary people—who will be AI’s real base, not academics or creatives wringing their hands over whether and how to incorporate AI into their work. AI mainly empowers the inarticulate; the genuinely good will likely eschew it, or limit its use to the most rudimentary tasks like formatting.

AI cannot be the truth-seeker. It can’t even be the standard against which we rate our students’ or employees’ performance. AI doesn’t work 12-hour shifts or struggle to pay the rent or commute in heavy rain. AI doesn’t cost overhead, leaves, benefits, and profit sharing; it’s never absent, and doesn’t talk back, indulge in water-cooler gossip, or comment snarkily on your OOTD (at least not yet). In fact, it doesn’t cost a thing beyond a basic subscription, easily recovered from the savings on paychecks. Sure, it doesn’t have “soul” or that “uniquely human touch” that poets and painters love to wax romantic about—but honestly, did you get those the last time you called Customer Service and demanded to talk to a real live person? How many people truly manifest “soul” and a “uniquely human touch”? 

Studies have already shown that AI will consistently outperform people in certain specific tasks. What we need to find is what we can consistently do better than AI. The key question I’d like my students to ask themselves is, “Why should they hire me, and not AI?” 

Better than just resignation, my current position is one of critical acceptance: use it where it helps save time and effort with routine processes (but make sure students understand those processes first), and with organizing material following some supervening human design. 

As soon as I say that. I know I’m idly hoping that people will resist having AI do their “thinking” for them, and will treat AI as a mere assistant or executor. In many cases, the temptation to have AI do everything will simply be too great. But this is where the most important element of human agency comes in: not even in the design of the project itself, but in the decision if and how to use AI for best results. If you can write better than AI, that might be the best result yet.

(Image from itexperts.co.in)

Qwertyman No. 211: Saving the Newborn

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Qwertyman for Monday, August 17, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Top image from miraclefeet.org)

Qwertyman No. 210: A Grand Experiment with AI

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Qwertyman for Monday, August 10, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(image from noveltymediaworld.com)

Qwertyman No. 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. 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.204: The Anatomy of a Grievance

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Qwertyman for Monday, June 29, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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