My mother said that if you want to go into law, then you take another course which has a pre-law that you can make use of if you don’t finish law. I took up accounting. I took up ROTC in order to be a diversion from my studies, because I didn’t like my course. It was a very lonely course, you’re counting figures. So to have fun, I took up ROTC. For young people, you have to have some group.

I found out that I had some leadership skills. That was my inspiration to get through my studies. I could talk to a number of people and they would listen, you know, and do what I wanted, do what I desired. Initially I was a model cadet in the ROTC. I enjoyed that because you know, when you’re young, you like ceremonies also.

As a model cadet you have to follow orders very seriously. I was good at following orders. You have to, because in order to be a leader, you have to be a good follower. So I wanted to become an ROTC officer, so I had to be a good follower.

Maybe I was 18 at the time. My leadership was more of inspirational. I like to inspire people, instead of forcing people to do something. Because there were those who followed strict leadership, which is dictatorial, authoritative, I didn’t like that. I opted to be inspirational or persuasive. People seemed to like you with that. If you are good to them, you’ll have a lot of people volunteering to come into your company and leaving others. And so, upon finding that skill, I proceeded to become an officer.

First you establish your relationship with friendly gestures. And then you now lay down your policy. Then of course they would start behaving sometimes quite indifferent because when you set a policy, when you set rules, usually there are reactions. It’s normal, because people don’t want to be tied up, you know.

They don’t want to be told, you know. So there will be reactions. So you remove the threat by your gesture of being friendly. And so, it is easy for them to follow you because they don’t want to break your relationship. In that way you are inspirational. They don’t want to offend you, because you are a friend.
When you side with the government, then the military is a very, let’s say, is a good option. I was already in the military when martial law was declared. I finished my training already in May, June, July, December, October, October, October – I think during martial law I was undergoing training.

We didn’t have much of an idea about martial law at that time, but we just thought that maybe it was necessary because, according to what we heard and read, the country was in peril by rebels both communist as well as Muslim, that it was an emergency that should be declared to avert destruction and the takeover of the government by illegal forces.

I was engaged in the Muslim rebellion in Sulu and Basilan, and I think I did a little better than others because I stayed longer than many of us. Before GMA (Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo) I was already against – I was running after the NPA already.

Communism being already a discredited ideology and a violent ideology has got to vanish. It should not exist. It should not exist. Meaning it was wrong to conceptualize that ideology. Whether it’s socialist or Marxist or Mao’s, they’re all the same, you know. The difference is only in the people implementing the ideology.

I do not like mostly the, well, the whole of it. The violence as well as the government system. It’s easy to distinguish a communist. They believe in a one-party rule, and then they follow a set of beliefs that cannot be questioned. So there’s no freedom, in other words. But the real communist according to Karl Marx as written, is that it will give us total freedom, total freedom and state of utopia, but that is impossible. But that’s what they are promoting you know, paradise. You are talking of an extreme situation where everything is free, then you can do just what you want and people do not resist you because they like it. It’s really impossible! There’s just got to be rule.

In this country, a left-wing politician is the same as a communist. I could really say that it’s just the same. There are some, some differences perhaps. You can tell by the body language. Moderate communism or what we call the leftist is just an introduction to the real communism, meaning, it is being developed. Maybe he believes that he cannot be involved. He doesn’t like communism, he’s just trying to be a catalyst. Just trying to have change, reform, but then, he could be eaten by the system he joins in.

Those who claim to be for labor, for press freedom, I would like to say that these are deceptions. I personally think I succeeded in my military career. I contributed to the country. I was successful, but I feel that I ran out of time. If I had more time, I could have done more.

Tagged as “The Butcher,” retired Maj. Gen. Jovito Palparan is blamed for the killings in Mindoro Island, Eastern Visayas and Central Luzon. He once said the tag has helped in his congressional campaign. Human rights organizations as well as the United Nations have demanded that he be investigated. Even the Arroyo-created Melo Commission also found Palparan liable for the killings in Central Luzon.

On July 7, after five years of campaigning by the mothers of Sherlyn Cadapan and Karen Empeño, the former congressman appeared before the Department of Justice to face accusations of rape, serious physical injuries, arbitrary detention, maltreatment of prisoners, grave threats, grave coercion, and torture, among other charges, against the University of the Philippines students.

Palparan calls the accusations an effort to embarrass the Armed Forces, the military and himself. He has done his duty, and the country is a better place for it.

“It is therefore with a ray of hope that I am herewith filing my Affidavit Complaint,” reads her letter, “for the violation of Article 124 of the Revised Penal Code (Arbitrary Detention) or possibly murder, in the enforced disappearance of my son.”

For four years, Edita Burgos believed her son was alive. This is not her first time to file a complaint, or her second. In the four years since several armed men hauled 37-year-old Jonas Burgos out of the Hapag Kainan restaurant at Ever Gotesco Mall along Commonwealth Avenue, Edita Burgos has filed no less than six complaints at various institutions, signing her name at the Philippine National Police’s Criminal Investigation Division, at the Commission on Human Rights, at the Court of Appeals, all the way to the Supreme Court.

Today, Edita T. Burgos, mother of a missing person, “Jonas T. Burgos, Filipino, 41,” will file her seventh plea for judicial aid, this time for the criminal offenses of arbitrary detention and obstruction of justice against several high-ranking officers of the Armed Forces of the Philippines.

In June of 2010, the Supreme Court claimed that the Philippine National Police and the AFP had failed in their duty “to conduct an exhaustive and meaningful investigation into the disappearance of Jonas Burgos,” and expressed dissatisfaction with the findings of both military and police. The high court said “serious lapses” in data prevented them from ruling on the claims filed by the Burgos family. The Court then assigned the Commission on Human Rights to take over the investigation.

On March 15, three months ago and almost a year after the order, the CHR submitted its report to the Supreme Court, which includes the filing of criminal charges against a Maj. Harry A Baliaga Jr., identified by a busboy in Hapag Kainan as one of Burgos’ captors. Another witness identified Baliaga as an officer assigned to the Bravo Company of the 56th Infantry Division. According to the CHR, “Most, if not all the actual abductors would have been identified had it not been for what is otherwise called as evidentiary difficulties shamelessly put up by some police and military elites.”

Jonas Joseph T. Burgos may or may not be a member of the New People’s Army. His mother is unwilling to say otherwise. Some of his friends admit he may have once been part of the movement. Newsbreak Magazine claims sources who have put Jonas among the members of the communist movement in Bulacan, the same area where more than 20 activists (including UP students Sherlyn Cadapan and Karen Empeño) were either killed or abducted in the last decade.

Members of the movement, some of them rebel returnees, identify Burgos as “Ka Ramon,” an intelligence officer for the NPA. “Ka Ramon” is the same name General Hermogenes Esperon gave Jonas Burgos in a May 14, 2007 document submitted to the CHR. In his testimony before the Court of Appeals, Lt. Col. Melquiades Feliciano, commander of the 56th IB, testified that “Ka Ramon” was on the military’s Order of Battle – the list of all enemies of the state selected for neutralization.

When Burgos was dragged out of Ever Gotesco Mall screaming “aktibista lang ako,” a security guard took down the number of the getaway car, TAB 194, later traced to the plate of a vehicle impounded by the AFP’s 56th IB.

The AFP has offered a range of reasons why the plate number of a confiscated vehicle in its custody ended up decorating the tailgate of a car racing down Commonwealth Avenue carrying the missing Jonas Burgos. AFP officials said the plate could have been stolen by members of the NPA to frame the AFP. They said the illegal logger from whom they snatched the car may have had a grudge on the military, and found a way to install the plate on the abductors’ vehicle. They said the battalion was away during the incident, leaving the compound open to robbers.

Edita Burgos says she does not understand the goals and methods of the New People’s Army, but she knows her son, and all she wants is to have him back. He is a Filipino and a citizen, rebel or no rebel. She has stood before reporters and human rights reporters from Manila to Geneva, holding up a photo of her lost son, the boy she says is most like his father, press freedom icon Joe Burgos.

President Aquino says he has not forgotten Jonas Burgos. He says they are looking for him. He says, at the very least, they want to know what happened to him. When he released the Morong 43 last December, he talked about Jonas Burgos.

The word “impunity” has been used many times in the last decade, to describe a state where murderers go about their bloody business, with no fear of capture or accountability. It was a state that Aquino promised to end with his presidency. Yet impunity does not need a small woman in a blue dress to applaud the work of butchers, or to command the massacre of the enemy. All impunity needs to flourish is the awareness that justice is unlikely, and that those in power have concerns more important than the death of a journalist in Palawan. As of March this year, 45 extrajudicial killings have been documented under Aquino’s watch, according to the group Karapatan.

If the facts prove true, and Jonas was indeed abducted as a member of the New People’s Army, there is a reason his family is willing to add the possibility of murder to this seventh complaint. In 2007, Bulacan farmer Raymond Manalo and his brother escaped from what he described as months of torture when he was caged, beaten, burned and made to drink his own urine by members of the Armed Forces, in a testimony that the Supreme Court described as harrowing and believable. Manalo claimed he saw the rapes of UP students Empeño and Cadapan, as well as the murder of another farmer. Edita Burgos knows this. Her sons know this. And so she says she believes he is still alive, all the while admitting that many times, she is afraid he is cold and hungry.

Today, Edita Burgos goes to court. The numbers of those who used to fill the streets in protest have dwindled. A few go with her, a little more than a dozen, a motley few with tired eyes. They are the mothers and brothers and sisters of the lost, all silent, all searching for their own Jonases, all willing to stand behind Edita Burgos, holding up placards with the face of Jonas Joseph T. Burgos, 41.

The military men called him a renegade. His people called him a hero. After Mexican troops massacred his family, he eluded capture for decades, resisting colonization, demanding his people’s freedom, disappearing into his beloved Sierra Madres even as 5,000 American soldiers thundered in pursuit. His small band of warriors stood as the last line of Apache resistance against white America. His name was legend long before he surrendered in 1886. They called him Geronimo.

More than a century after, another American leader watched over the capture of his own Geronimo. For 40 minutes, America’s first black president waited as several special operations teams invaded Pakistani airspace on a mission targeting America’s most wanted criminal. President Barack Obama heard the announcement at the same time as his team of aides and advisers did. “Visual on Geronimo.”

Later, word came that “Geronimo” had been killed. The news reached the President as “Geronimo EKIA”—Enemy Killed In Action.

Geronimo was the name the US military gave to al-Qaida’s Osama bin Laden.

It is now the naming of Geronimo that has cast a pall over America’s national triumph. The Native American minority protested the move, calling it “deeply insulting” for the Obama government to compare their ancestor to a terrorist responsible for the murder of thousands. For a people whose history is bloodied by violence, death and subjugation, whose names were taken away and replaced with the names of white men, the affront runs deep. Their Geronimo was a hero, and America made him a terrorist.

“Right now Native American children all over this country are facing the reality of having one of their most revered figures being connected to a terrorist and murderer of thousands of innocent Americans,” said Fort Sill Apache Tribal Chairman Jeff Houser.

Aquino
They say he was the last of the statesmen. At a time of murder, torture and abduction, he challenged a dictatorship whose one policy was survival.

The government called him a communist. The people called him a hero. After martial law was declared by a dictator in 1972, he continued as one of its staunchest critics, earning him imprisonment and eventual banishment. The story is told that he knew of his fate long before the day he fell bleeding on Manila’s airport tarmac. His assassination became the catalyst for a revolution that destroyed a tyranny and returned hope to a much-abused people. His name became part of a myth that defined the best of the Filipino. His name was Ninoy Aquino, and they called him a hero.

When his son ran for the Senate in 2007, he promised the same fearless leadership that had killed his father and made his mother an icon of freedom.

“We have to be different from those that we are opposing or replacing, otherwise we’ll just have a merry-go-round, and nothing will really change.”

Asked how he felt knowing he would sit across men who had once threatened his life and that of his family’s, he said although he would work with them, “If they stand up for something which I think is wrong, I will oppose it as far as I can in all legal ways possible.”

This is the same man who ran for the 2010 presidency using the mythology of good against evil, reminding the country in every speech and every commercial that his name is Aquino, his father was Ninoy Aquino, martyr and statesman, his mother was Cory Aquino, saint and leader. He won the presidency on the strength of naming—he was the son of heroes, and his name was Noynoy Aquino.

Aquino said his family celebrated the Edsa People Power Revolution of 1986 because this has been the “defining moment of the country’s departure from the darkness.”

Hero
They say he was a tyrant who was once a good man. It was greed that turned him. For many years, the country suffered under a leadership whose generals lived like kings while millions went hungry. In 1986, the people overthrew him, after the death of Ninoy Aquino and the rise of yellow-clad Cory. His name was Marcos, and now he is to be named hero.

His son, Sen. Bongbong Marcos, thanks the 190 congressmen who support the resolution seeking to allow Ferdinand Marcos’ burial at the Libingan ng mga Bayani. His father deserves it, says the senator. It is a debt the nation owes.

The Marcos children have denied their father’s involvement in the abuses that occurred during the dictatorship. They say their father was a hero, that his name has been demonized by enemies of progress. They are victims of injustice. Imelda Marcos, the woman they once called the Iron Butterfly, whose lavishness has made her name synonymous to unnecessary extravagance, now lends her name to a line of jewelry and to the congressional seat of Ilocos Norte. She calls herself a patron of human rights. This after a decision, 25 years coming, that awards compensation to the 7,526 victims of torture, enforced disappearances, rape and abduction who suffered under martial law.

Before he was elected president, Noynoy Aquino committed to maintaining the standard of heroism that his father began and his mother continued. Men like Ferdinand Marcos did not have the right to aspire to the name. He said the country continued to suffer from problems that were created under Marcos’ rule.

“Why should we honor him by burying him at the Libingan ng mga Bayani?” he said. Aquino’s campaign manager Florencio Abad Jr. spoke for both his candidate and the party.

“That is reserved for heroes and we do not concede that Marcos is a hero. We still have to find closure to many abuses our people suffered in terms of political repression, the conjugal hypocrisy and many other issues.”

Now, one year after, the son of heroes has little to say. He has refused to make the decision that his own mother made in 1986 and Fidel Ramos made after, passing the controversial decision instead to his Vice President Jejomar Binay. Aquino says he is unwilling to make a decision because of his biases, forgetting perhaps that Binay himself has long been an Aquino loyalist, a man who had risked his life in the ’70s against Marcos and his men in defense of human rights. Perhaps he also forgets the presidency is not about objectivity, it is about principle—one he promised a nation that believed in his.

Surveys now say 50 percent of the public supports the Marcos burial—a reasonable result, granting also that the generation surveyed believes Marcos is a billboard model and Aquino is the brother of an actress with STD.

Naming
His name is Ferdinand Marcos, president, tyrant, thief and hero. He will be a standard for what is right and just. His sins will be the sins of the next generation of heroes.

When the story is told, the story is this: once there were heroes, until they lost their names.

“I do hope it doesn’t reach this point again. It would have been better if they had been sensitive to our culture, and respectful of our faith.”

Castro is speaking of a recent McDonald’s ad showing two small children talking in a playground. In the ad, a pretty young girl, maybe 5 or 6 years old, asks a little boy if he was her boyfriend. The boy shakes his head. Girls, he says, are much too demanding, asking for too much too often. The girl corrects the boy—all she wants are McDonald’s French fries. The boy jingles the coins in his pocket and grins. And so happy boy and happy girl walk down the street, as a voice-over informs the public that McDonald’s fries are now at P25.

There may be many and varied reasons why McDonald’s French fries are a danger to the public health, but it is only now that God’s fast-food preferences became an issue of multimillion-peso interest. Castro demanded the junking of the 30-second commercial, claiming that it taught children the wrong values on human relationship. “They should replace it. It doesn’t look good. The emotional, relational bonding of people was made to look shallow that’s why it should be replaced,” said Castro over Church-run Radio Veritas.

That God prefers Jollibee over McDonald’s may be the only rationale behind the Church’s ire. Certainly it isn’t because of McDonald’s disrespect to Catholic teachings, else the CBCP would have howled louder over a 2006 Jollibee commercial where a small boy stands in a church beside his praying mother, and proceeds to violate the Fourth Commandment by thanking God for his Jollibee dinner. Neither can Castro claim that the treatment of love and relationships is particularly offensive, else he should be called lax in his duties by permitting Rhian Ramos to equate love to the joy of a Jelly Trio. In fact, to judge the Church by its own standards is to condemn it for failing to speak against an industry that suggests love can be achieved via the right shampoo (for long, straight hair) or through the constant application of moisturizers (for whiter skin in just seven days). Where was the Church, for example, when a barefoot Marian Rivera ran laughing in sun-tanned splendor past a drowning man to secure her PLDT load?

The insistence on malicious interpretation—should PLDT then be condemned for violating the Seventh Commandment?—is Castro’s own concern. It is odd to assume children see the world through the CBCP’s own paranoid lenses. There is, after all, little malice in two children calling themselves sweethearts. Following this logic, every decent God-fearing parent should take their belts to small daughters who come home with crushes on the boy in red stripes who reigns over the sandbox, should assume the beginnings of a life of sin when a 7-year-old son offers his last cookie to the pig-tailed girl next door.

The problem, according to Castro, is that young children should not be told of courtship at such a young age, the same argument he has been using repeatedly against sex education. “Instead of teaching them about the values of loving their parents, loving God, and loving nature, they are being taught about human relationship that is not proper for their young age.”

And still the Church said nothing when McDonald’s “Huling El Bimbo” commercial became a viral hit in 2009—a narrative that revolved around a pair of childhood sweethearts—perhaps because the publicity was not as crucial.

This is by no means a condemnation of the Church or a religion as a whole. It is instead a criticism of the holy men like Castro who bestow hell and damnation on all individuals whose religions and moralities differ from that of God as defined by the Vatican. These men paint themselves as martyrs and crusaders, willing to face evil for the sake of saving their people.

“In this world that is growing steadily to be a militant secularist and anti-religious environment,” he says, “we are faced with a number of choices—to shirk from the challenges to stand up for the Faith so as to avoid “confrontation.”

It makes the whole issue more damning against the Church, especially when the man who claims to speak for morality, Castro himself, has demonstrated the same sort of slavering loyalty expected of the various spokespersons employed by then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. It was Castro who immediately denied the Church had anything to do with a controversial parish announcement denying communion to RH bill supporters, even when that parish admitted drafting the same announcement.

It was also Castro, in spite of the Church’s much-vaunted concern over the state of political Philippines, who informed then ANC reporter Ricky Carandang that it is better to vote for a crook rather than for the politicians who supported contraception. And when the BBC exposed the extent of sexual abuse committed by Catholic priests and the silence of the hierarchy, even while the Pope sent apologies to families of sodomized boys and traumatized girls and admitted forgiveness cannot equal the justice predatory priests escaped, Father Castro, executive secretary of the CBCP Episcopal Commission on Family and Life, self-proclaimed defender of the rights of children, wrote in his own blog that in spite of the Church’s cover-up, the Church committed no sin.

“What cover-up is to the secular media is the prudent judgment of the Church on her members. [The Church] does not pass judgment and imposes penalty in a public manner. She does so silently, as a good mother does to her erring children.”

McDonald’s has served no one by its failure to stand up to the intent of its work; neither has the Church served itself by allowing men like Castro to read the gospel. Any other man would have been ignored as a coward and a hypocrite. This is not an issue of French fries and public compromise. The issue is truth, and it’s a principle I am told Castro’s God died to protect.

After their execution, Presidential Spokesperson Edwin Lacierda offered the government’s sympathies to the families left behind.

“It is a sad day for all of us,” says Vice President Binay, whose efforts in behalf of the convicts secured a month’s reprieve in the executions. “Until the last moment, we did everything we could to save the three.”

The Philippine government has not made any secret of the fact the three drug mules were guilty of their crimes. They admit it; their families admit it. Presidential spokespersons are careful in saying they do not condone the crimes. The President said they were asking for leniency. The appeal to China was hinged not on injustice, but on “humanitarian reasons.” In short, the Philippines asked China not to kill, because killing is inhuman.

Only Binay knows just how sincere he is in his defense of the dead drug mules. There is no doubt as to his political savvy, as he offered sympathies and scholarships to those left behind. Immediately after his much-publicized appeal for Chinese clemency, Binay’s approval ratings soared far above President Aquino’s. The fact that his role as savior is tainted with hypocrisy has done little to affect the surveys. It was Binay, after all, who only a month before the executions announced his support for the restoration of the death penalty in the Philippines. Binay demanded the death penalty after a spree of killings that left the charred remains of car dealers became national news.

“We are talking about Filipino culture here, and Filipino culture requires discipline,” he said in a January interview over GMA7.

The restoration of the death penalty has long been the knee-jerk reaction in the aftermath of public violence. “Public,” because violence and death are daily realities in the Philippines; it is only for the rare crimes that pierce public consciousness that officialdom is galvanized into calling for the noose. Mr. Aquino’s own mother Corazon Aquino certified as urgent a bill proposing death as punishment for rebellion after a bloody 1989 coup. High-profile murders during the Ramos administration created the new death penalty law in 1993. President Joseph Estrada ordered the deaths of seven men in his term. Rapist Leo Echegaray was the first of the executions. “The crime committed by Mr. Echegaray was an act of bestiality which deserves the stiffest punishment under the law.”

The argument is stunning in its simplicity—death is a lesson to the criminal, his death will deter future criminals. And yet there is the question of the effectiveness of death as deterrent. According to position papers by the Free Legal Assistance Group, “The overwhelming conclusion from years of deterrence studies is that the death penalty is, at best, no more of a deterrent than a sentence of life in prison.” The average crime rate in fact rose by 6.5 percent in 1994 with the re-imposition of the penalty, with rape rising by 44 percent in 1995.

Politicians, with very little effort, are suddenly viewed as avengers, feeding public anger while creating the illusion of a solution. And yet it is also one of the most-loved bargaining chips of the state. Estrada, who vowed he would veto any move to repeal the death penalty, promised to repeal it himself after strong lobbying by the Catholic Church and the European Union. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who began her political career opposed to the death penalty, announced she would order the immediate executions of up to 95 convicted kidnappers after a surge of violent kidnappings among the Chinese community and foreign missionaries.

“Let us prepare the lethal execution chamber for those champions of darkness for the sake of our society,” she said.

Yet in 2006, she signed a law abolishing the death penalty—the day before she left for the Vatican for a meeting with Pope Benedict XVI.

The list goes on. The death penalty after the Maguindanao massacre, the death penalty after the Alabang Boys controversy, the death penalty after the botched Manila hostage rescue. Now it is the Vice President, new hero in a nation of the forgetful, who supports the return of death. Today, two bills sit in Congress for the restoration of the death penalty. One demands execution for capital offenses, including car theft with homicide and the trafficking of dangerous drugs. The other, filed by Rep. Jane Tan Castro, makes death punishment for illegal logging.

This is what lives are reduced to: bargaining chips and distractions, even as the justice system has proven time and again its fallibility. Capital punishment would have murdered Hubert Webb, whose acquittal today has him tossing a basketball at his father. Even in the United States with its more sophisticated investigations and more stable justice system, at least 121 people have been released from death row after evidence of their innocence emerged. During Estrada’s term, one convict was killed just as Estrada called to offer a last-minute reprieve. Former Supreme Court Justice Artemio Panganiban has continued to claim the execution of Echegaray was not lawful.

And so we wait, while three families mourn, for the next controversy that will send the gentlemen of Congress scrambling to file yet another death penalty bill. Perhaps the lesson is simpler, and there is no contradiction. Perhaps Binay is a hero, and the lesson is this—that murder as punishment is inhumane when China pulls the trigger; that it is justice in the hands of a Filipino executioner.

In 1995, when the 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck Kobe, the Japanese government proved itself unready for a disaster that killed more than 6,000. The country was unwilling to accept international aid, information was withheld from the public, civilian initiative was lacking, and commercial buildings were prioritized over the rebuilding of much-needed housing. Many lives were lost that could have been saved.

It was a lesson that Japan did not forget. This month’s quake had government forces streaming into stricken areas, volunteers have taken the slack, the survivors gritting their teeth against the cold. There is a determined attempt to maintain business as usual, with lines of people still queuing to pay taxes, and little complaint as to the inconvenience of lost power and insufficient water. There is no looting, and little hysteria. Although the nuclear crisis has shown another Japanese weakness, the Kobe experience ensured the implementation of building codes that demand earthquake-resistant engineering. The country may be staggering, but it could have been worse.

Outside Japan, the public reaction to alleged Armageddon has ranged from the predictable to the incomprehensible. Radiation levels are being tested, the skies over California eyed suspiciously by a public tapping out Twitter updates. Food is being tested. Passengers are being checked. A slew of celebrities have made the news—actress Sandra Bullock donated $1 million just as comedian Gilbert Gottfried was fired for jokes made at the victims’ expense. “I was talking to my Japanese real estate agent. I said ‘is there a school in this area.’ She said ‘not now, but just wait.’”

“Family Guy” TV series writer Alec Sulkin tweeted that feeling better about the quake was just a matter of Googling “Pearl Harbor death toll,” rapper 50 Cent joked that the quake forced him to relocate “all my hoes from L.A., Hawaii and Japan,” while a press secretary for Mississippi resigned after circulating a Japan joke to staffers.

Perhaps the most telling example of the emotional impact resulting from the disaster is the dropping out of a third year student from the University of Southern California, whose online rant against Asians went viral the same day as the Japan earthquake.

The three-minute clip has the blonde-haired political science major, all cleavage and bubbly bright-eyed righteousness, complaining about Asian students using their cell phones in the library. Alexandra Wallace demonstrated the Asians’ “lack of American manners,” smiling directly into her webcam as she explained, “In America, we do not talk on our cell phones in the library.” Every 15 minutes, she said, one of the “hordes of Asian people that UCLA accepts into our school every year” would pick up a phone and say “Ching chong ling long ting tong?” It was, she continued, as if they “were going through their whole families, just checking on everybody from the tsunami thing.” The university was debating whether expulsion was an option when Wallace left, citing death threats. For the west, the lesson was clear—there is no tolerance left for bigotry. The land of the free will not save the cheerleader from the angry world.

And in Manila, land of tragedy and calamity, mayhem and massacre, the tragedy has the apocalypse fear at fever pitch. Even news anchors murmur off-air that the end of the world will likely happen before 2012. Look at the signs, say the doomsayers. Thousands of drum fish drowning in Arkansas. Flocks of turtledoves falling out of the sky in Italy. The Mayan calendar ending, the flooding of 2009. A text message purportedly from the BBC sent droves into drugstores, emptying shelves of iodine antiseptic Betadine, allegedly the first line of defense against radiation from Japan. The Polytechnic University of the Philippines suspended classes after its president Dante Guevarra reportedly received a text message that radioactive clouds from Japan would reach the country by 4 p.m. Guevarra denied the report, he said the suspension was meant to reassure parents.

The lesson Japan learned from the Kobe disaster seems to have escaped the Philippines. Past the iodine raids and hoax messages and frantic phone calls to Tokyo-based relatives, the reaction has not gone beyond the usual posturing. The National Disaster Risk Reduction Management Council (NDRRMC), supposedly a paradigm shift away from its usual reactionary stance—notice how many times the NDRRMC has said “paradigm shift” in its year’s worth of press conferences—has done much reassuring and little action. It is not surprising, as NDRRMC is still run by the armed forces, in spite of protests by the academic and scientific community. Today, in spite of the sight of the world’s most disaster-prepared country reduced to industrial rubble, despite studies citing faults cutting under Metro Manila ripe for movement, even with structural estimates that predict intensity 7 structural damage at 40 percent, deaths at more than 50,000 and injuries in the hundred thousand, still the NDRRMC claims it is ready for tomorrow’s quake.

NDRRMC’s executive director, retired Gen. Benito Ramos, said that preparedness is based on the alertness and preparedness of each community. He said each community should have its own plan. Interior and Local Government should supervise. The Department of Health will take care of health consequences. Some buildings have been inspected and they determined there must be further inspection. Yes, he tells the media, we are ready for the quake.

This is, after all the same Benito Ramos who claimed the country was ready for another “Ondoy,” saying that all squatters along waterways have been warned to leave because of the danger. Ondoy has not yet come calling, but neither have the waterways been cleared, nor have the settlers left—logical granted there is neither incentive nor compulsion. Ramos is mistaken if he thinks a few MMDA fire drills will save Manila whose buildings are weakened by corruption and whose homes have been built over an active fault line. There is no demand for relocation, and little impetus for community planning.

The aftershocks may not be over. This is Manila, before the disaster.

There are some who say the king was once a just man, and a wise one, whose heart turned dark at the taste of power. Others say he had always been mad, and hid his madness behind a cunning charm.

The king had a queen, the most beautiful in the world, and again there are those who whisper that it was she whose madness turned the king’s. So they ruled, the black king and his butterfly queen and their army of bloodthirsty knights, from a golden castle built on a lake whose waters turned a darker red with each cruel year.

And then the hero came. It was a long, grim battle, and as the hero died bleeding, an army rose, led by a woman in yellow who came to mourn the hero she loved. They marched to the castle, unarmed and unchallenged, a crowd of peasants and merchants and loyal knights singing of peace and love. The dark king fled before the yellow army, his mad queen tripping over the diamonds that fell from her cupped hands. The people rejoiced, the woman in yellow was crowned queen, and peace reigned in the land where a golden castle stood on a lake of shining waters.

Sometimes the story changes. Swords turned to flowers, the cannon-fire into rose-colored smoke. The woman in yellow walked with an angel of God by her side. The dark king’s cruel men were once knights forced to evil by a powerful spell. What did not change, as the story was passed on from father to son and mother to daughter, was the truth the mad king hid for many years: when a true hero rises, good will triumph over even the most evil of evils.

The story does not end with the defeat of the mad king, but that is the part that is not told very often to the children born during the reign of the lady in yellow. I was one of those children, born 25 years ago into a free country. I understood that evil had a face and a stench and a name that often, but not always, ended with Marcos. Good was colored yellow.

It was a story that was told when I was 15 and a man named Erap was stripped of his presidency and called a thief. The heroes were named: Joker Arroyo, Chavit Singson, Clarissa Ocampo, Hilario Davide, Loren Legarda—she of the tears and the pink suit. Many of my generation joined the march, glad to finally be part of the legend, to be on the side of right, among the fist-pumping crowd behind the Cardinal and the Widow. Good won that day, they say, Joker Arroyo’s nation would not be ruled by a thief—a man who did not have the decency to disappear into the dark, who continued to charm his millions of barefoot supporters, many of whom took up the banner of Edsa and ran howling in defense of Joseph Estrada, President of the Philippines, alias Asiong Salonga. The heroes did not call it a revolution. It was a mob, they said. And so a new queen was crowned by God and country, a small woman who stood in opposition to the villain whose swagger and smirking moustache offended more than his alleged thievery.

The promise was the same. Here was the new hero, come to bring order into the chaos of Estrada’s gambling government. The street protestors returned home, their duties done, secure in the knowledge that the story had reached the natural happy ending. And so Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo lied and cheated and compromised the fledgling institutions rebuilt after martial law, going about her business while the country waited for the promised change. By the time the red queen was named, even the myth failed, and no amount of revolutions and prayers and yellow power could shake the composure of the “mother of the nation.” The dead had been buried, or stolen away. Still the heroes came, and were cast quickly into their roles. Jun Lozada, surrounded by a pack of clucking nuns. Joey de Venecia, who in spite of his unwillingness to play politics, ran for senator the election after his national confession. Today, they are just part of the story.

Twenty-five years after the first People Power in Edsa, the heroes of martial law snipe over who failed the promise of People Power. Edsa has failed, say the critics. Failed because the tyranny of the Marcoses was replaced by the oligarchies that gained power with their leaving. There are no laws, only the money to buy them. The farmers are landless, the debt is ballooning, the poor have gotten poorer and the generals still steal from the same public coffers. The heroes broke their promises while the mad queens ran mad. Look at the graves among the sugar fields of Hacienda Luisita, remember the massacre in Mendiola, see how they betrayed us, deceived us, destroyed the dreams we built together.

Still the yellow flags flew again last Friday, on the same street, in celebration and in pride. Remember Edsa, say the heroes, remember what we did. Remember what our people can do. And so the story is told again, how it was, how it should have been.

This is how the story of my country should be told, after the mad king falls and the yellow queen is crowned.

Once, there was a yellow queen, brave and bright and true. She stood among her men, who held her hand as she walked to her new throne. As the days went by, and the sounds of battle faded, many of her knights fell, some overcome by power, others by fear. Many more could no longer see which side was the side of heroes, and so chose what they liked and later forgot why. Those who knew how to play the game emerged winners, and still keep their high cards to this day.

And so the yellow queen failed, and the country with her, for they forgot that a queen cannot stand alone. And so they told the story, again and again, waiting for the hero, waiting to rise, in the hope of returning to that single moment when good and evil stood apart, and evil vanquished by songs and prayers. They waited as the kingdom crumbled, rose to rejoice at the return of the messiah, and returned downcast as the waters continued to turn red.

This is the lesson my generation takes from the years after Edsa. There are no messiahs, or perfect kings. There are only men who have the same weaknesses as the men they lead. Sometimes a good man chooses the hero’s path, and no matter if his heart is true and his blood the blood of heroes, the kingdom will fall for as long as its people demand a story that should never have been told.

“If I had prior knowledge that she was high-pitched, I wouldn’t have been offended.”

His wife, who appears to see no wrong in her husband throwing around the term “menopausal” as an insult, has filed a letter of complaint against Ocampo. It was Madame Magsaysay who informed Flight Attendant Ocampo that her husband was by no means an ordinary person, but a congressman of the republic.

The same sense of entitlement is shared by the President himself, whose pains to prove he is nothing like the extravagant former queen had his press team crowing over the hotdogs His Excellency consumed at a New York visit. The dramatic compassion took a beating this month when Benigno Aquino III bought himself what is rumored to be a P4.5-million Porsche. The President claims the Porsche is third-hand, paid for not by taxpayers but out of his own pocket. Former presidential spokesperson Cerge Remonde made a similar claim when attacked with President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s seeming insensitivity to the impoverished national plight—the million-peso Le Cirque dinner, he said, was paid for by another congressman, and certainly did not come from national coffers. It is an argument that matters little in a starving nation, although it appears to be too much to ask the President to hold off Porsche purchases until 2016.

The President hopes he will not be judged for it. The heavy weight of national responsibility demands some form of relaxation, and if a Porsche can make him smile, even for a moment, the public must understand.

“I want to relax sometimes, it could help me with my decisions.”

Perhaps this is the same understanding that Sandiganbayan spokesman Renato Bocar has extended to retired Maj. Gen. Carlos F. Garcia when Bocar announced on national television that the former Armed Forces of the Philippines comptroller, who had amassed a total of P303.27 million from 1993 to 2004, may perhaps be a victim of injustice.

Garcia was found with millions in unexplained wealth, holding titles of varying properties, including a unit in Trump Plaza. Garcia’s two sons were arrested for failing to declare $100,000 at the San Francisco airport, and admitted to hiding the money in their luggage. Juan Paulo Garcia, 29, and Ian Carl Garcia, 32, of Las Vegas, were indicted on December 9, 2008 on bulk cash smuggling and conspiracy charges. The brothers admitted to the accusations, and that they made false statements to US Customs and Border Protection officers about the amount of money they were carrying. The United States confiscated the smuggled dollars.

Garcia’s wife Clarita, in a handwritten and witnessed statement, admitted to receiving kickbacks and commissions from military contractors.

“During these travels, my husband always brings me along and we are each given travel allowances by the proponents/host country. … As a wife I am also given an envelope as they called ‘shopping money’ that I can use for my own discretion, no receipt of how we use the stipends are ever required. Business class airfare/first class hotel accommodations and transportation are provided by the host/proponents and this happens [sic] on every trip since 1993 to present.”

In December, the government reached a plea bargain agreement with Garcia, agreeing to drop plunder charges in exchange for pleading to the lesser and bailable offenses of direct bribery and money laundering as well as the return of P130 million worth of assets. The Office of the Ombudsman argued that their case against Garcia was weak, and that to accept the money would allow government to shore up its losses while recovering half of the amount Garcia had allegedly plundered.

It appears the nation owes a debt to Garcia, who so kindly offered to return stolen money to allow the government to pay for its debts, never mind the cause of justice. According to Bocar, the retired general could have easily beaten the plunder charge and walked away a free man. That P128 million, the remainder of the unexplained wealth, has been withdrawn by the Garcia family before the assets could be frozen seems to be irrelevant to the prosecutors from the Ombudsman’s office—they are happy enough with the results.

As to the congressman and the menopausal bitching, he hopes all will be resolved.

“Perhaps an investigation would be good,” says Magsaysay, “so that the public may know what really happened. This could have happened to any congressman or person. It’s as if because I’m a congressman I’m automatically the villain. Let’s not be like that.”

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view. The bitches are kept on leashes; the jokers hold hands with thieves.

“It may interest you to know,” he tells journalists in a Nov. 18 press conference on the Maguindanao massacre, “that on a visit to Fort Magsaysay in September, one of the places President Aquino visited was the Aquino-Diokno Shrine.”

Coloma waxes poetic on the momentousness of the occasion, on how the Armed Forces of the Philippines took the initiative to put up the shrine, how AFP now understands the value of human rights, how the AFP’s offer to observe Human Rights Day at the monument “represents a sea change” in the mindset of the military.

The Coloma press conference was held two days after members of the AFP shot an unarmed botanist three times in the back in an alleged and questionable crossfire, but perhaps Coloma did not believe this would not interest the media.

The government, says Coloma, is serious about human rights. Coloma wants to remove the stigma that the Philippines is the third most perilous country for journalists to work in. He says a task force has been created especially to investigate the killings of media men, that this “demonstrates the government’s objective that the safety of media practitioners” is a high priority, and “not just lip service.”

The Aquino government has chosen to adopt the Maguindanao massacre case, calling it “the litmus test of our justice system.” It is, he said, one of the top priorities of the justice department. “We will not rest until justice has been served.”

Asked about the rights of the 43 health workers who have been tortured and illegally searched and arrested by elements of the Armed Forces and the police, Coloma says Morong 43 was a problem inherited by the Aquino government. “By the time this administration took office, the courts had already gained jurisdiction over the case.”

Asked how the case is different from that of the coup plotters inherited by the Aquino administration and granted amnesty by President Aquino himself two weeks before the case’s promulgation in court, Coloma complains about the comparison.

“We should be careful in establishing links. The amnesty case involving now Sen. (Antonio) Trillanes (IV) is something that could be traced back to an event that happened seven years ago. I don’t think we are seven years from the start of the Morong 43 case.”

Besides, adds Coloma, the coup plotters were raising institutional concerns against the Arroyo administration. “I don’t think that is the issue for the Morong 43.”

A government that calls itself a champion of human rights cannot pick and choose which humans are deserving of which rights. Perhaps Coloma believes that claiming the enemy of their enemy is their friend is justification enough to brush off the much-violated members of the Morong 43, many of whom have had the honor of having members of the AFP wipe down their female organs. The rebel amnesty proves that inherited cases in court do not necessarily mean inaction by the government. In the case of the Maguindanao massacre, Mr. Aquino has written to the Supreme Court, made phone calls to its spokesperson, declared Nov. 23 a National Day of Mourning, given statements and demanded closure, in spite of the fact the massacre was not an event that happened seven years ago, that this case is clearly an inherited case from the previous government, and that the alleged perpetrators were clearly not raising institutional concerns against the Arroyo government.

This is not to say that the Aquino government has done well in its much-publicized pursuit of Ampatuan justice. After 11 months of the case in court, police still refuse to turn over ballistics reports to the prosecutorial team; and 119 suspects of 196 still remain at large. According to Coloma, this is a problem, but one that should not necessitate much concern. The President, he says, has “every wish and every resolve” to bring those at large to justice, but “he also needs the support of the law enforcement machinery.”

Besides, says Coloma, only very little time has elapsed since Mr. Aquino came to power. “Perhaps if this is still the case in a year, we can really claim that nothing is happening.”

Asked why the warlords of surrounding regions have not been disarmed, including the Mangudadatus of Sultan Kudarat, he tosses the burden of proof to the media, asking for specific instances, telling them to instead speak to the generals in charge. It is enough to look at the AFP report that says over 2,000 civilian militiamen were armed not just in Maguindanao, but also in Sultan Kudarat and Cotabato on Nov. 23, 2009, enough also to look at the Ampatuan supporter killed allegedly by a Mangudadatu bodyguard this year in a public mall. Perhaps he would like to speak to the residents of both Sultan Kudarat and Maguindanao, who say before Nov. 23, there was little difference in the names Ampatuan and Mangudadatu, or even the members of the government’s own Mindanao-based intelligence services, who admit it’s safer to forget your slippers at home than your gun.

The Ampatuan problem was inherited by the government of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, from the governments of Ramos, Estrada and Corazon Cojuanco-Aquino. That Arroyo took advantage of that inheritance does not excuse Aquino from facing it. This government won by echoing the sentiments of the masses, by decrying poverty and corruption and the slowness of the justice system. Now they trumpet how they “disdain” the “so-called political warlords who employ their resources to threaten national order,” now they shake their heads at the “institutional weaknesses” that mean the case will take at least 18 years. Campaign season is over, the power is theirs, the promises have been made, and yet they are unable to employ the machinery of government to put a stop to all they condemn.

It would be easy to dismiss Coloma’s statements as his own, but he is not just Coloma, the man who eagerly consigned the Aug. 23 hostage massacre as another inherited fault from the Arroyo administration. He is Herminiano Coloma, head of the Presidential Communications Operations Group, alter ego of Benigno Aquino III, President of the Republic of the Philippines, Chief Executive and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. Aquino does not need to lobby for support of the Armed Forces. He does not need to wait one year or seven years. He is President. When he says “we,” he means the government, not the opposition.

On Nov. 23, 2010, President Aquino issued his condolences to the families of the victims of the Maguindanao massacre. Three days before that statement, Coloma was asked why four Muslim families whose women were killed on Nov. 23 have received no aid from the national government. Coloma said that they would certainly look into this concern.

He added, however, that the aid “was a commitment by the previous government.”

In the end, when my director says cut and the boys pack away their cameras, we leave with thanks and no promises. Sometimes I catch my director, the madman with his tattoos and silver studs, pressing what would have been his talent fee into the hand of a barber whose one regret is that he can never afford to bring his children to Jollibee. One day my assistant director showed up lugging a sack of his clothes, to give to the 17-year-old sixth-grader who lost his father and mother and still continued to study by the light of an oil lamp—because “I want to be the first person in my family with a high school diploma.”

And then there is Julie and Fernando.

They live along Panay Avenue, two blocks away from ABS-CBN, at the shrieking center of a screaming city, inside a blue van with the word “egg” in fat baby blue letters painted over its doors and windows. The tires are flat, the steering wheel long gone, and three small children crowd the front seat.

Fernando is a 35-year-old farmer from Bulacan, who came to Manila to work as a janitor. Julie is 25. They fell in love in the cafeteria where she worked the counter. He was handsome, she said. He said she was beautiful. When Fernando lost his job, they took to the streets with their babies, picking up trash in a wooden cart painted a happy yellow. This was where they ate, where they slept, where they kept their tin pots and piles of trash for selling. They spent nights in empty parking lots, spent days wandering crowded streets for the P150 they would earn if they were lucky. They found the van nearly two years ago, sitting alone on the road, filled with refuse and the occasional rugby boy. Julie asked permission from the van’s owner, who let them live inside, their few clothes hung on lines along the windows.

The toys are few: a grey plastic elephant the length of a thumb, a small car from a rubbish heap, a yarn bracelet in lilac and pink. Their oldest goes to preschool, her yellow uniform hung carefully with a backpack beside a small pile of clothes. There are no toilets and showers in the world of Fernando and Julie. She is embarrassed to admit this, but there is nothing else that can be done. They wrap body waste in plastic, piss into metal pails for throwing, and head to Q-mart to take baths at P10 a person.

Some nights, when the heat is too much and the baby cries, they sleep on the convent steps, the missionary sisters of St. Charles Borromeo smiling at them in the mornings. Julie used to cook with wood and fire, but Fernando says they’ve stopped. Someone stole their pots and pans when they were away on the streets.

There is a yellow ribbon pasted on the back of the van. During the run-up to the 2010 elections, Fernando volunteered for the presidential campaign of Benigno Aquino III. Julie says her family has long been a fan of the late Ninoy Aquino. Fernando registered at the polls, helped carry chairs, hung posters at the house on Times Street. He cannot read or write, has never in his life deciphered the letters of a street sign, and will not recognize the Aquino name if he sees it. So Julie colored the empty circle for him, and Fernando was happy. He said he wanted to be part of making a good country.

There are rules they live by. Do not steal, because people will help you if you ask, but they will hate you if you take. Do not ask money from family, because family will resent you forever after. Keep the van clean, because the local officials might decide you’re more trouble than you’re worth. Sleep lightly, because both eyes closed means someone may do to your pedicab what they did to your pots and pans. Take a bath once a week, but make sure the children are bathed every day. And stay together, no matter what happens.

The surveys that came out this Christmas announce 69 percent of Filipinos in a population of 90 million will spend the holidays happy this year. Happy is an odd word in the narrowing vision of families scraping by; happy is just the difference between a meal and no meal. On Christmas Eve I saw Julie sweeping the sidewalk outside the van, the baby tripping over her feet. She smiled, and said there was no money for Christmas dinner. We planned for this, the boys and I, and although what we gave may not make a world of difference to the rich and the powerful, it makes for a thin buffer against the daily challenge of staying alive.

There are flies that flit over the open van, and there is dirt no matter how much Julie sweeps, but they have tied a crumpled red ribbon on their pushcart, and carefully lettered “MERRY X MAS” and “HAPPY NEW YEAR” on the back of campaign posters hung in place of the van’s missing front windows. This is not the life that they should be living, not the life anyone should be living. This is happy by default. They do not ask for charity, they ask for a chance, in spite of the accident of birth that makes one man a president and another a scavenger.

This is for Julie and Fernando, and for the other Julies and Fernandos who attempt happy Christmases this year. I write with the hope that by telling their story a President will remember to say his thanks, and those with joy to spare will pass by a broken blue van at the screaming center of a shrieking city, where alleluias soar with the howling of a KTV bar, and say Merry Christmas back to Julie and Fernando.

To everyone, a Merry Christmas.