On paper, the sentence is imprisonment, up to six years. In the dank back rooms of Manila slums, and in the emergency wards of public hospitals, the sentence can be death. In 2008, at least 500,000 women resorted to abortion. Ninety thousand suffered complications. A thousand died.

In the Republic of the Philippines abortion is illegal. There are no exceptions under the law. It does not matter if the woman’s life is at stake on an operating table in the Fabella General Hospital. It does not matter if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, if the expectant mother is a 9-year-old girl in the slums of Tondo, if the fetus is expected to die within the womb and the woman with it.

That the penalty of abortion is often death is not a secret from these women. They know this. They’ve seen it happen. Women who risk death are not concerned with the legality of their actions, they are willing to push the twisted end of a plastic hanger into their uteruses; they believe they have no other choice. They may be afraid of God or death or the arm of the law, but they will carry on. The criminal penalty meant to stop abortion has not stopped millions of women; it has only stopped them from seeking help when they are bleeding into the cheap wood floors of their makeshift homes. Criminalization has pushed them into the streets of Quiapo, outside the Church of the Black Nazarene, where the voices of priests echo in prayer and tablets of Cytotec are sold six for a thousand alongside plaster statues of the Virgin Mary.

Her name is Maricel, she was 18 and already a mother. That year she was granted a visa to work as a domestic worker overseas. And then she discovered she was pregnant. She induced her own abortion for fear of losing her chance to support her family. She failed, and went to a woman who inserted catheters into her uterus. It took two weeks of infection and vaginal bleeding for Maricel to decide to go to the hospital “because she was scared.” Her story ended on the operating table. The doctors said she died of septic shock.

The Republic of the Philippines is one of the last countries in the world that continue to call every instance of termination of pregnancy a criminal act, and because it is, every woman who commits abortion commits it on her own. The Philippines has one of the highest numbers of maternal deaths in the West Pacific Region, 230 dying out of 100,000 live births, as opposed to the regional average of 82. Unsafe abortion is responsible for up to 20 percent of these deaths.

Her name is Josie, 26. She went to an abortionist, pressed down on her abdomen and thrust a fat hose up her vagina. She was in the clinic a long time. She bled. Some of the blood stank. There was blood on the bedpan, on the sheets, gushing in chunks. The blood was very red. At home, she bled for more than a week. In chunks, in gushes. She thought she would die.

Those who condemn these women point to their culpability. Whores and sluts, murderers, should have kept their legs closed if they didn’t want a child. Should have abstained. Should have been good, responsible women, should be good mothers, should take responsibility. That most of these criminal women are Catholic, married, uneducated and desperately poor does not matter to many of their critics from Church and laity. Opponents of the Reproductive Health Bill say they oppose the provision of free contraception because to permit it may lead to permitting abortion and in one stroke denied thousands of women freedom from abortion.

This is Ana from Manila, mother of eight, who induced an abortion after her ninth child. She said she could not use family planning, because it was unavailable. A Guttmacher study says that in Manila, where an executive order was issued banning contraception in public health centers, the incidence of abortion is higher than in any other part of the country. A national government that makes contraception impossible for 90 percent of the population has no right to echo an impossible morality. They call these women criminals—the same government whose buckling under the Catholic lobby in the issue of reproductive health has forced millions of women to face the option of abortion.

This is Aileen, a mother of five, three of whom were still babies. She risked an unsafe abortion when she found out she was pregnant with her sixth.

“Only those who are better off, rich, can talk about abortion as illegal. They have no worries about raising their children… They do not know what it is like to be poor and desperate… Poor women have limited options… Everything I did was for my living children.”

This is the sort of woman they call a bad mother, a criminal who deserves to bleed to death in the corners of hospital rooms. The stigma of abortion coming from its criminalization means that when women who suffer after unsafe abortions find the courage to go to a hospital, medical staff believe they have the right to discriminate against such women. There is no such thing as patient confidentiality; there is no such thing as priority for those who are dying in gushes. The Jason Ivlers of the world can get their confidentiality and medical care after a shootout with the police, but in this country, the bleeding woman is the exception to the Hippocratic Oath.

This is Imelda, 30 years old. She was bleeding when she arrived in the Fabella Hospital. The doctors shouted at her. They said they would call the police. They said they would not allow her to leave the hospital if they discovered she had an abortion. She was allowed to bleed without care for four hours, and was interrogated by nine different health workers while she bled.

This is Lisa, and in Gat Andres Bonifacio Memorial Medical Center, they told her she would be arrested if they proved she had aborted. They made her sign a document in English, a language she could not understand on paper. A nurse put a notebook-size sign at the bottom of her bed with the word “abortion.” There was no chart with her name, only that one word.

This is Gina, and when the staff of Tondo General discovered she had aborted, she was left alone. Her back was soaked in blood. She wished someone would give her a napkin, a diaper, anything. Nobody did.

This is written in support of the decriminalization of abortion, in the hope that safe abortion will be offered for women in cases of rape and incest and risk to life, that women will no longer be ignored in emergency rooms because of who they are, that contraception will be provided so that no woman will be forced to see abortion as a choice, and that the thousands who choose the risk of back alleys and coat hangers will be called victims instead of criminals.

Call it by its name: abortion. In this country, every woman who chooses abortion is a criminal, and the sentence is often death and pain. One thousand women died bleeding in 2008, nobody was held accountable, because for some, these women deserved to die. The state holds them down; the Church watches them bleed. The criminals are not always women. The crimes are not always theirs.

They pray, these women. They believe in God, and some of them believe that God is forgiving. Today, at least three women will die, because they have no reason to have the same faith in their fellow men as they do in God.

In a decision penned with commissioners Elias Yusoph, Armando Velasco and Lucenito Tagle, Commission on Elections Commissioner Ferrer proclaimed multimillionaire Juan Miguel “Mikey” Macapagal Arroyo, son of former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, the legitimate representative of the nation’s security guards and tricycle drivers. Ferrer, Yusoph and Tagle make up the same holy trinity that replaced the Constitution with the fire-and-brimstone rantings of a Pennsylvanian Baptist preacher from an online website when they justified banning gay representatives from government.

In the learned opinion of Ferrer and his colleagues, party-list group Ang Ladlad did not belong in government on “moral grounds,” because “practicing homosexuals are a threat to the youth.”

These gentlemen, with the addition of Velasco who suddenly reversed his opinion, are the “gallant commissioners” that Mikey Arroyo thanks, “who, despite pressures from our critics, upheld the will of the people who voted and put their trust in Ang Galing Pinoy and its nominees particularly this representation knowing fully well I am its first nominee.”

Late last year, then Presidential Spokesman Gary Olivar defended Mikey Arroyo’s nomination, saying that a nominee does not necessarily have to be in the same line of work as his party-list minority. Olivar said that what is vital is that the representative possesses skills enabling him to perform effectively in Congress. This is the same logic Ferrer and his colleagues employ, an assumption that anyone can represent anyone, for as long as he has a college degree, and, hopefully, a name that includes “Macapagal Arroyo.”

Mikey Arroyo—who at no time before the election season manifested any sort of public interest in the hand-to-mouth existence of tricycle drivers and security guards—has passed the standards of the Comelec with flying colors. That the nation’s largest security guards’ organization, the Philippine Association of Detective and Protection Agency Operations Inc. (Padpao), does not recognize Arroyo does not seem relevant to the Comelec. Arroyo, says Ferrer, was able to show proof that he has been a member of Ang Galing Pinoy since December 2009, and that he advocates for the rights of its members.

What is important, says Ferrer, is that a person truly understands the advocacy of the party-list group he is representing.

It is difficult to imagine what sort of proof the son of former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo can show to prove he “truly understands” the plight of a security guard on minimum wage working a 12-hour night shift and providing for a family of six, or of the security guard’s family whose breadwinner was gunned down in one of the bloodiest robberies in Cabuyao, Laguna. It is possible the former action star presented his Regal Films’ acting stint starring opposite the sexy Katrina Halili, where he played personal bodyguard and driver “Eric” to the voluptuous “Raven.”

This is where Ferrer manifests his bigotry at his patronizing best. In an interview on ABS-CBN’s morning show, “Umagang Kay Ganda,” the Knight of Columbus said he does not think a tricycle driver or anyone from the country’s marginalized sectors is capable of drafting laws.

The party-list law is founded on the single principle that men are equal, but power is not. It offers the marginalized citizen the opportunity to represent himself and his people in government. Education does not matter. Experience does not matter. Income, family, dirt under the fingernails, none of these matter, for as long as a man stands for those forced into edges of democracy. It is why it is offensive that the millionaires of this country have bought their way into their congressional seats by stomping on the shoulders of those they are supposed to protect.

A minority is not about numbers; it is about power, and the lack of it. Women are minorities, and are represented by women who understand what it can mean to be held down weeping on a bed by a sweating man with a hard-on and told to spread her legs. The elderly are minorities, represented by the men and women who are turned away by government welfare and cheated out of benefits. Under Republic Act 7941, farmers, urban poor, fishermen, the indigenous, the youth are minorities, because unlike the Ateneo-educated, four-car-owning, Forbes-residing members of the Filipino elite who occupy congressional seats, they have no voices, no power, no pull with presidential mommies.

“Can you imagine a tricycle driver being able to draft a law?” Ferrer said.

It is this, more than anything, which demands the impeachment of men like Nicodemo Ferrer from the Comelec. There are bigots and jackasses in this country. There are men who believe marital rape and battery are rights and that women have none. There are still men who fire gay men for being gay and corporations who have left farmers barefoot and desperate. That these people exist is another function of growing democracy. But for a commissioner of the Comelec tasked to protect a system for the empowerment of minorities to believe a minority is too stupid, too uneducated, too much unlike the Mikeys of this country to sit in Congress is an offense against democracy. It is as ridiculous as putting a fascist at the head of the United Nations, Jovito Palparan as chairman of the Commission on Human Rights. This decision, and the men behind it, further discriminate every security guard who stands in front of a coffee shop, compelled to clear tables and wipe down chairs, and every tricycle driver stopped by a policeman out for cigarette money. Ferrer and his colleagues put their faith in Mikey Arroyo, because he is one of them.

In the Church of Nicodemo Ferrer, God is a bigot, and his name is Nicodemo.

Understand that this is written under the influence, only that the influences contradict, particularly the alcohol and the bottles of energy drinks and the opinion of this nation’s last living hippie. My ponytailed mentor now mourns the murder by political intrigue of his Pollyanna, shakes his head over the loss of one more writer into the convenient pit of casual cynicism. In the bar where we sat with drunken poets on a Friday night, the smoke stung the eye, the singer crooned of love blowing in the wind, and the scotch-swilling captain with the LeBron James obsession demanded lightness. Write of raindrops, he said, and roses. Write about friendship and football and fried chicken wings. Write light as a feather, write happy, write like you’re sixteen.

It is difficult to be told to write lightly when your consciousness is dependent on a haze of Anhydrous Caffeine and Sodium Benzoate and Aminoethyl Sulfonic Acid, that and the fact you have no idea what lightness now involves. Senator Miriam Santiago sues an airline for the moral damages of waiting, the weather bureau blames a storm for behaving like a storm, a female toady to the corrupt (she of the electric blue and leopard print scarves) now claims to be the most eligible official to punish thieves and scoundrels, and a preacher’s son has been told by the high court that being young at heart does not quite cut it when it comes to representing the hope of the nation in the lower house.

That all these have taken on the grapey stain of Kool-aid purple farce may be of interest to those of us whose lives are tied to the odd workings of the state, but that is not the point of this column. That there is no point is beside the question, the point is only not to make that point.

I ask forgiveness from those who have read this far and expected depth – it is a baseless expectation, and one that needs correction. I am, after all, a girl in her early twenties with a leather fixation, who includes among concerns of firewires and monitors and wi-fi routers the vital question of where to put a piercing the bosses will not notice. Pretending maturity is a difficult undertaking, especially when you make quiet deals with fairies and turn around three times to keep bad luck away, when you believe, reality and history notwithstanding, that Prince Charming will eventually come rampaging into your story on a souped-up Harley to pound at your door, and when you hope, against all reason, that Triumph lingerie will someday reverse itself to end its discrimination against the smaller end of the cup-size continuum.

And so to lightness. This column is in pajamas, checkered and blue with yellow bunny rabbits. This column gets haircuts from ex-boxers; this column wears four-inch heels. This column can survive crashes into steel poles with only minimum damage to the pole. This column sings in the rain. This column will subsidize condoms if the universe will subsidize its life.

This column can see stars out of the balcony and occasionally has hot water in the shower. This column has seen both John Lloyd Cruz and the Duke of Buckingham, and will trade the Duke’s handshake for a photo with Lloydie. This column believes plagiarism is relative, and that anonymity has no balls. This column is about Dear Darla pizza and cans of Sprite Zero and taking pictures of the fat white moon while waiting for the truth to appear on the inside of a napkin ring. This column will trade cows for magic beans and will assassinate ellipses wherever they hide. This column raises a toast, to a barefoot brown gypsy with a painted butterfly on her ankle and a smile so sweet that kittens and writers and the odd dreadlocked diver all fall a little in love.

This column is in revolution. This column will tattoo the letter “s.” This column will buy the cheapest of cheap knee-high boots and will take a bikini to Hawaii. This column is glad to see a mayor in Manila and a rebel dispensing justice. This column will give yellow a chance. This column has hope. This column believes in sacrifice and citizenship, but protests that Ricky Carandang is just too much to give up in the name of patriotism.

This column will ignore the half-naked filmmaker, who justifies arriving late with the announcement that he comes from the future. This column is about words, and language, and the swirl of sentences, about boys who wait outside locked bathrooms with glasses of water, about lost girls and the people who look for them, about gentlemen called Madame and fathers who send pink Valentine roses to their daughters.

This column will lose its temper and find it at six in the evening in the freezer with the last hot fudge sundae. This column will wait for the Irish postcard. This column will go to Book Sale; this column is lucky; this column is tipsy; this column believes, this column will buy pepper spray in defense against egos that go ping in the night.

In a universe of many columns, this column is glad to be a part. This column will be happy; it will revolt against itself. It will slick on red lipstick, step into high heels, toss politics out the window, and stare at Spanish ass on a borrowed TV.

This is this column’s one truth: the only way to live is to live alive. This column may not be a column today, but right now, this column is mine.

I write this now, nine years later, my first column under a government without Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her white-knuckled grip on the national reins. The country is fat on optimism, flying on the wings of a karaoke-singing President whose voice boomed strong as he swore a promise to a sweating crowd at high noon. Gloria is gone, off to be president of her fiefdom in the north. There is a new President, whose first days, fumbling as they were, showed a decided partiality towards rights and justice. Blow out the smoke, holster the guns, there is freedom, there is beauty, there is truth and love.

As may be patently obvious to anyone who has read this column in the last three or four years, I find faith a rare commodity. Faith, after all, is a risky proposition when you spend nine of your formative years being indoctrinated by a loving government that optimism is a refuge for fools. The Philippines I know is a place of blinking neon lights and small grimy hands shoving into purses and pockets, of dead men in cardboard boxes and suicides in high-class malls. Justice does not come only because justice should, being hungry does not mean a McDonald’s meal with extra rice, and sometimes, turning a key on a front door is all that is necessary to warrant death.

Understand that I did not believe all these things in the beginning. Young writers are told very often to write about what they know, and so I wrote of high heels and possibilities and the brightness of September fire trees. It wasn’t some instinct of conscience or goodwill that had me digging into rapes and disappearances and the varying histories of the last government’s savagery. It was disbelief, an unwillingness to accept that the pretty lady was a butcher and that there were men who had no compunctions about sticking shards of wood into communist vaginas. One question led to another, one column to the next: the dead man had a lost son, someone said the pregnant girl had been seen, a 9-year-old girl named Grecil died in the mountains and was called a communist rebel.

I suppose everyone can pinpoint some sort of grand growing-up, the tipping point, the moment when the stiletto heel breaks on the way to the senior prom. Mine happened when I was 19, at a church refuge in Sta. Rita, Bulacan. The sunlight shot off the tin roofs as a man with a bullet in his elbow staggered forward on his mother’s arm, towards a wooden bed inside a cramped room. His name was Patricio Manahan, and he was home when armed men came hunting for his militant brother Arsenio. Arsenio was not home, so they went for Patricio instead. Three shots, neck, elbow, arm, bang, bang-bang. I had a notepad, I had a pen, I stopped writing when he reached down to pick up his 2-year-old girl and realized he couldn’t take her in his arms.

That all this happened in the government of Gloria makes it possible to believe that life will be different under Benigno Aquino III. That’s the promise of democracy: that no matter if a leader fail, there is a next one who can take her place, someone better, someone who deserves our trust. It is a cycle that is both vicious and promising. The fall of Joseph Estrada led to the expectation of a president who would not plunder the national coffers and play footsies with the drunken tycoons of the Chinese mafia—and yet we had what was perhaps the most savage administration since the Marcoses decided to introduce their New Society. Now the end of the Arroyo regime comes with the buoyant anticipation of a state whose national policy is not butchery, whose watchword is accountability. It is one thing to hope, but it is another to expect.

Hope springs from the heart of darkness, optimism from a sense of expectation, of entitlement. The jobless American has a right to his optimism, can expect the welfare check and the basic medical care and the certainty that his child will not need to scrounge in wet trash outside a hotel parking lot. Hope is not the conviction that things will turn out right in the end; it is the dogged persistence that in spite of the possibility, the probability, that things will not, we stand anyway. Those of us who live in this country have no right to optimism, but we have every right to the stubborn, defiant belief that that today is history, that what we do matters, that it is worth it even if we lose. It is why we will continue to demand and defy, even if there are no certainties, no calculable ends, no real messiahs, only men who try.

This is not to say I do not have faith in my President. I do not expect perfection from the Aquino government. I believe, quite frankly, that Noynoy Aquino is carrying much more than he should. The weight of myth and legend is a terrible thing, an impossible demand from someone who is only a man. I doubt even the reality of Ninoy Aquino could have lived up to the demand made of his son today.

Hope is, as Vaclav Havel puts it, a state of mind, not a state of the world. For almost the entirety of the Arroyo administration, Edita Burgos went from court to camp, searching for her son even if there was no reason to hope he would be found. If this government fails, she will walk on, court to camp, rally to rally. It is the reason why Raymond Manalo managed to escape from the chains and the beatings and the chunks of blood in buckets, even if he risked certain death. In the nine years of the brutal administration of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, we did not stop hoping, the protests continued, the vigilance remained, even if the woman was blind and deaf and careless of those she served.

This is what I will promise to remember, every day, for the next six years: the 13-year-old boy who, somewhere in this country today, sees Noynoy’s face on a poster and believes

His name is Raymond Manalo, and he was a farmer. The armed men took him on Valentine’s Day. He was also 21. They said he was a communist. They beat him with chains and planks; poured his own piss down his nose, stuffed him into a four-by-one foot cell with three other men. When he escaped, he talked about the man in the next cell, who lost his mind and hanged himself with the garter from his underwear.

His name is Jonas Burgos, and his father was a hero. He was disappeared at three in the afternoon of April 28, 2007. His mother traced the license plate of the getaway vehicle to the Army’s 56th Infantry Battalion headquarters. Every year, Jonas’ sister greets him over the radio on his birthday. His mother is still looking for him, she says this government will not break her family.

Her name is Cecille Lechonsito, and she was home for the holidays from working in the Middle East. She had daughters she had not seen for two years, and a husband she was accompanying to a hospital for a check-up. They were driving a red Toyota Vios. Two days later, the car was found buried in the foothills of a small town called Ampatuan.

His name is Nestor Bedolido, and he was a reporter for a weekly paper in Davao del Sur. He was buying cigarettes at a street corner when a man shot him, walked to a nearby motorcycle, and rode away. Bedolido was rushed to a hospital, but he was dead on arrival.

His name is Suwaid Upham, and he said he was a murderer. He asked to be called “Jesse” when news channel Al Jazeera first interviewed him, when private prosecutor Harry Roque announced he had a new witness to the massacre whose 57 victims included Cecille Lechonsito. The man called Jesse was shot dead in Parang, Maguindanao last June 14.

Upham was the first witness to admit participation in the massacre. He named six others, including Datu Unsay Andal Ampatuan Jr., the pudgy man who laughed in court while prosecutors rolled video of the massacre’s aftermath. Upham said he feared for his life because the Ampatuans had been killing off all possible witnesses, and because he had heard the orders for his execution. When he ran, it was with the hope he could offer his testimony and be included in the Department of Justice witness protection program.

On the first of March, Upham was flown to Manila by Roque and his associates, three days earlier than planned at the behest of the DOJ. The meeting with a DOJ high official was set for 3 p.m., and was to be held at the office of Commission on Human Rights Chair Leila de Lima.

According to Romel Bagares of CenterLaw Philippines, who had been arranging the meetings, the DOJ official cancelled. He said he had an emergency. According to Assistant Chief State Prosecutor Richard Fadullon, it was Roque’s group who changed the venue and schedule. A second meeting was arranged, Bagares admitted to changing the time, because Jesse suddenly had to be moved to another safehouse. The DOJ demanded that the meeting be held in their offices.

It was Upham who refused to be interviewed at the DOJ premises. He believed that there were members of the department who had been abetting the Ampatuans.

According to staff of the Witness Protection Program, Jesse “has been saying that DOJ officials were in cahoots with the Ampatuans, so why then would the WPP offer to take him in? There was lack of faith on his part, that’s all. He should have sought protection from other authorities that he believed he could count on.”

According to CenterLaw Philippines, the DOJ refused to discuss a second meeting. Upham left Roque’s protection for Maguindanao, after saying he was unhappy with the DOJ. He said he felt he would be safer there. He was wrong.

Acting Justice Secretary Alberto Agra, the man who had initially absolved two of the principal accused in the case and later revised his resolution after a storm of public outrage, is fighting a pitched battle for blame against Roque.

“I am taking this personally. I’m piqued because he is attacking the department,” said Agra.

It is true that it is difficult to comprehend what logic Harry Roque and his people were using to allow a man they believed to be a valuable witness under threat of his life to return to the Ampatuans’ Maguindanao, a witness that Roque himself pushed to the national media and made a possible target. Roque says that they were running out of resources, that they had assurances from Upham’s relatives that he would be safe, that they had no mandate to keep Upham against his will. It is also difficult to comprehend why Roque and his people failed to inform Human Rights Watch, or the Commission on Human Rights, or any other body that could have stood in the way of Upham’s homecoming and inevitable murder.

“In the case of Jesse,” Agra says, “he was never under our program. Who is at fault? Mr. Harry Roque. I am taking this personally,” says Agra.

What is clear is this: that the Department of Justice failed, brutally and thoroughly, in its mandate to dispense justice and protect those who seek it. That Upham refused to meet at the DOJ should not have been cause to stop protection negotiations; neither should the imagined or real arrogance of one Mr. Harry Roque. That Jesse refused to be interviewed at the DOJ should not have stopped Agra from pursuing an interview—especially since that lack of faith is an indictment of an institution whose failure to bring to justice the murderers of at least 30 media men has been criticized by the United Nations. In spite of his lack of faith in the DOJ, Upham was willing to meet.

According to Human Rights Watch, Agra had been told at a meeting to look into the possible protection of Upham. HRW said they had corroborated many of the man’s claims; they said the man was seeking protection. In that meeting, Agra said he had never heard of Upham, and committed to looking into it. Upham is dead now—because the official tasked to protect him allowed his men and his personal whims to get in the way of the pursuit of justice. That Upham was a possible witness, that he was begging for aid, that he was, in fact, in danger of his life, should have been enough for the justice secretary to stir out of his office. Now Upham is dead, because his killers were not afraid of the hand of justice.

This is the result of nine years of the rule of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, a state where murderers are permitted to build armies for the price of loyalty, young film critics are murdered in their own kitchens, while the man meant to deliver justice sits at his desk and informs the media that he is “extremely happy” with the work he has done.

In three days, Benigno Aquino III will become the president of the Republic of the Philippines. Commission on Human Rights Chairman Leila de Lima will take over the Department of Justice.

His name is Suwaid Upham, and he said he was a murderer. This is written in the hope that when De Lima wrests justice from Agra, Jesse will be a name that she will not forget.

“Since the President is stepping down after nine years,” says Economic Spokesperson Gary Olivar, “I don’t know if we would still take away from her the opportunity to communicate, even just a little bit, what she has done the past nine years.”

The pageant begins with a float titled “Budget Reform”—a last-minute change, as the original item in the agenda was “the balancing of the budget” and no such balancing occurred with a projected P293-billion budget deficit. It is a last bid for legacy and memory, remember me, see what I’ve done, so long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, good night. In a series of advertisements—on taxpayers’ money, naturally—welcoming the new president, Ms Arroyo also spent considerable space congratulating herself for a job well done, as awkward a welcome as her congratulatory phone call from Shanghai to President-elect Benigno Aquino III.

It is Independence Day in the land of the yellow morning, and the euphoria is still riding high with the moral victory of the son of heroes against the villains of Philippine politics. His is the crown, hail to the king who slew the bad queen.

Criticized for his appointments to the Cabinet, his defenders leaped into the fray, offering sword and shield against all who have questioned his decisions. It is true that much of the criticism is unfair—some have condemned all members of big business, have condemned all entertainers, have condemned all former members of the Hyatt 10, for no other reason than their affiliation. That is wrong, just as wrong as this newspaper implying that those who did not vote for Mr. Aquino have no right to demand, to criticize or to question.

“Others may have some things to say about that,” says the Philippine Daily Inquirer, “but the crucial post-election question is: Shouldn’t the winning candidate be given the space to implement his platform?” Should people who did not vote for Aquino “dictate how Aquino should form his government to meet his mandate?”

It is Independence Day, and democracy is tripping over its own yellow shoelaces. The public does not dictate, by opposing it engages, and what matters is a government that is willing to engage with these questions. The argument that a president should be left on his own, to have space to implement his platform free from criticism, because “an undisputed election victory is another way of saying” that we should “cut him some slack” is an odd idea, as if winning a landslide is a passport to a no-holds-barred party in Malacañang. The right to question does not belong only to partisans. They belong to the people, whether they voted for Aquino, or Richard Gordon, or Joseph Estrada, or accidentally colored in the circle for Jamby Madrigal.

In another Independence Day, on another afternoon nine years ago, it was President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo who was the People Power president, who was the sudden and reluctant hero who faced down the bad king. For a time it was love and roses and national headlines, a positive approval rating and a mandate that came from the caped crusaders of the Supreme Court. And it was that complacence, the lack of questioning, of criticism and engagement that made many of the sins of the Arroyo administration possible.

So when Aquino announces that his refusal to stop smoking is a virtue and a manifestation of his independence, it is necessary to ask if it is good for the nation that the incoming Philippine president has offered presidential endorsement to a product so dangerous that all advertising was banned in 2007. When he leaves sex education to the mad bishops of the Catholic Church, it is important to ask how he believes he is still promoting women’s rights. When he says that he is against appointing relatives to positions in government, it is fair to ask what stunning credentials have led him to offer the running of the Department of Tourism to his sister’s best friend at his sister’s suggestion.

“I was the one who brought it up with Noy,” says Kris Aquino, “I was the one who brought it up with Boy, not realizing that it would cause such a major [issue].”

This is not to say an entertainer cannot run a government department, but neither is being an entertainer a virtue in itself—it is as illogical as saying Senators Jinggoy Estrada and Lito Lapid are equally good lawmakers because they are both entertainers. It is the same question that should be asked as to why “actor-hunk” Dingdong Dantes should run the National Youth Commission, or why Ogie Alcasid, who starred in the celebrity extravaganza that was Aquino’s first commercial, should have a position that has “something to do with the youth.”

If they say yes to his offer, says Aquino, “Why not?”

It is necessary to ask why. To critique is not to dictate, it is to participate, to speak, to engage. That promise made on May 10 when millions lined up for hours for the right to choose leaders begins its work now, and will continue for the next six years even when the applause ends, love dies and the hero is stripped of legend.

It is Independence Day in the land of the morning, where the moon is a greasy pearl, freedom is a Twitter hashtag and the brave bawl wet in their cradles. Take down the swag of yellow flag, let the stars out, let the sun shine—it flies blue and red today.

“Sometimes, you just get too lazy to go work.”

Her name is Roxanne and she is not a virgin, in spite of how the Catholic Church would like to view 15-year-old Catholics. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines has expressed shock and dismay at the proposed teaching of sex education to younger students.

There is a proper time and a proper age, says CBCP spokesperson Pedro Quitorio III. Fr. Conegundo Garganta, of the CBCP Episcopal Commission on Youth, puts the proper age at 17.

“That is the time we should say children are more equipped to handle such topics.”

That some of these children are already equipped with their own children at 17 years old does not seem to matter to the sons of Holy Mother Church. The homily of Quitorio includes a touching faith in the sense of parental responsibility of a population scrambling for a meal a day. All teachings in reference to sex, he says, “should be left to parents, especially when children are underage.”

Irrelevant of the odd notion that only 17-year-olds have the capacity to “handle” sex as an idea, the idea is there whether the child is 9 or 19, whether the child can handle it or not, and it’s the rare child who will not wonder about slot B when tab A wakes up in the night. There will always be the question, and the impulse behind the question—whether a result of basic puberty or MTV or the whole wide universe of tits and asses and the kid next door who saw Pa making love to Ma. The Department of Education proposal includes sex education of younger students, one that begins not with a Kama Sutra menu of sexual acts, but an understanding of the human body.

It is delineation that Department of Health’s Esperanza Cabral takes pains to define. “Teachers and parents should be ready to answer correctly when asked by children why they are different from their sisters or brothers, what makes them female, what makes them male, and where their siblings came from.” She added, in an ABS-CBN interview, that children, especially girls, should also learn that any other person should not touch their private parts. It was the Church’s own Bishop Oscar Cruz who agreed with Cabral in this respect.

Yet spokesman Quitorio still stands by his argument. What is needed, he says, is “the proper sex education, not sexuality that focuses on the physical aspect of sexuality, but as a sacred gift from God.”

It must be remembered that many of the Church’s own priests have been found in recent years to have offered that sacred gift to a legion of wide-eyed Catholic boys and girls—a disgrace that the Pope has been attempting to address with personal visits and letters of commiseration. In the past year, scandal after scandal has ripped across the Church hierarchy, not only of generations of priests abusing altar boys in the vestry, but also of a conspiracy among Church heads that had families signing vows of silence to protect the institution. From Malta to Ireland to Germany to congregations in Boston, Los Angeles and Verona, the stories of pedophilia and payoffs have spilled from the Catholic cup. The same stories of abuse in Filipino parishes circulate today, but they rarely come to light in official reports—not a surprise in a country with a tradition of bowing to the man in the white robe.

I say this not to embarrass an institution that has time and again stood for the Filipino people, I say this because even institutions fail when the men and women fail within them. The same is true for the state and for the family, and it is why education is vital, whether from family or church or state. This is the truth: that fathers touch daughters where fathers never should, that there are young girls who do not know a period means the possibility of pregnancy, and that even congregations need protection from the men to whom they confess their sins. There is nothing to stop churches from emphasizing the value of abstinence and sex as a sacred gift, but there is also a responsibility that rests on the state to protect its citizens, no matter how small they may be.

Abuse knows no age, neither do sexual impulses begin at the proper age of 17, or 21, or when the marriage contract is signed. Teachers need training, schools need resources, but the principle stands, whether it means teaching a 7-year-old it’s bad to let someone diddle with her genital organ, or to explain to a college boy that safe sex doesn’t mean only having sex with Christian girls, the whole spectrum of sex education in schools is not a matter of personal morality—it is simply a function of practical necessity.

The CBCP worries that the government lectures on anatomy, diseases and safe sex will create a generation of promiscuous nymphomaniacs without fear or conscience. The Church makes one caveat—it will permit sex education on college levels. Perhaps they are aware that the Roxannes of this country do not go to college, and rarely make it past freshman year in high school.

CBCP Youth’s Garganta says that due to the popularity of the Internet, “promiscuity will continue to happen” in students whether or not sex education is taught in college-level learning institutions. This is an important admission: it is not the lectures responsible for the sexual impulse, it is the environment, though it is doubtful it is only that.

In late 2008, asked by Akbayan Party-List Rep. Risa Hontiveros to attend talks on sex education, Quitorio refused the invitation saying sex education is nothing new to the Church. “The Catholic Church has more information and documents on human sexuality than the legislature.”

It is interesting that they missed the part that says 14-year-old girls, sometimes named Roxanne, are equipped by God to be human and sexual.

“It’s part of the process,” he says. “The people must get to know me.”

It is a new phenomenon in the annals of a notoriously secretive Supreme Court. Although many in media and society have demanded transparency from the courts, the sight of a coiffed, alternately defensive and glad-handing Chief Justice who drops sound bite after sound bite may not precisely be what the public needs to hold the courts accountable. Very little can be gleaned from Corona’s blitzkrieg media crusade, other than his constant and consistent announcement that the Corona court will be a fair court. Court spokesperson Midas Marquez may soon find himself with time on his hands.

This comes on the heels of the Court’s controversial Bersamin decision, voiding Article VII, Section 15 of the Constitution, and permitting outgoing president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to appoint a new chief justice two months before the elections during the ban on appointments. Critics, from legal stalwarts to former constitutional commissioners, claimed that the Supreme Court wrongly interpreted the provision meant to prevent an outgoing president from indirectly extending her rule through last-minute appointees in key offices. As expected in the administration of Gloria, the denouncement of the decision did not matter.

Two senior justices refused their nominations, insisting on waiting for the next president to make his decision. Justice Renato Corona accepted the nomination, the same Renato Corona who ran the gamut of chief of staff, spokesperson, chief presidential legal counsel, acting executive secretary and presidential chief of staff of President Arroyo. His decisions, according to Newsbreak Magazine, favored the President over 78 percent. Before his Supreme Court appointment, he had yet to hold any judicial positions.

It is true that his former loyalties do not mean he is incapable of fair judgment. It is also true that his voting record, although seemingly favorable to Ms Arroyo, neither proves nor disproves his biases and his right to his new office. The Judicial and Bar Council has determined that Corona is eminently qualified to head the Supreme Court, and although the Supreme Court decision on midnight appointments may be one of the Court’s most ridiculous yet, it is still the decision of the Supreme Court.

It is not the appointment of Corona that should be questioned now; it is the fact that he accepted on the terms of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. The same can be said for those who have accepted the nomination, and should be said if Carpio and Carpio-Morales had chosen to fight for the seat.

There is a reason why among all branches of government, the judiciary is where image is most important. Men who serve in the Supreme Court have given up cocktail dinners and press meetings, junkets and partnerships. They deny interviews with the media, they do not write columns, or speak of knowing the people. They isolate themselves from influence; remove themselves from the public eye, not only for their safety, but to protect the image of the institution of justice. Unlike officials in the executive and legislative branches, justices are not voted in, they are appointed in a silent, highly politicized, mostly incomprehensible process. They take on credibility by virtue of nothing more than the black robes of their appointment, and they keep it by the decisions they make and the careful faces they offer to the public at large.

Justice demands faith, a belief in a higher intelligence that shows neither fear nor favor. When the people lose faith in those who offer justice, decisions, no matter how fair or balanced, will cease to have any effect. It is the state of the country now, where the violated run to news desks and the rebel camps instead of police stations, and a man can sit in jail for 18 years without seeing a judge in a courtroom. This is a Court that already carries the stain of the Arroyo name after a decade of one woman strutting all over the Constitution in high heels.

“I am not in favor of the statement that I will bend to the appointing authority,” says Corona. “I haven’t decided yet. Wait until I’ve decided the cases and how I conduct the business of the Court. You should talk after one year or after I’ve rendered several decisions.”

He forgets that he already made the decision by which he will be judged: the impulse to grab the golden ball at the risk of the rest of the Court. Carpio and Carpio-Morales knew this when they stepped back and insisted on waiting for the next president to appoint, in the same way Corona must have been aware his chances of appointment were far less in competition with the two giants of the high court. There is no clear and present danger that demands a new chief justice today. The Court will stand, decisions will be made, and justice will be parceled out until the thirtieth of June. If this man had been willing to take his chances, to allow the next president to appoint, he would have spared one of the last democratic institutions the burden of being called the Arroyo court for the next six years.

Corona calls criticism water under the bridge.

“I’m sure over time, when I’ve proved myself, the public will learn to appreciate me.”

It is a dangerous burden for the Court, and the man who has shown himself vulnerable to criticism. He has removed his wife from her government position in John Hay as a response to attacks—a move he should have enforced the moment he was appointed a justice, as if his wife’s position was any more or any less a source of conflict of interest now as it was when he was not yet chief. He tells Noynoy Aquino he too is an Atenean and therefore a kindred spirit; he keeps his face before the camera eye, creating a target for an already staggering institution. He has compromised the Court by announcing his fallibility to gossip and innuendo, while playing politician on 24-hour cable. Now he has put himself in a position that compels him to make decisions that are obviously independent of Arroyo, instead of simply making independent decisions. It is an odd bias, but it will be one just the same for a man who seeks appreciation.

“Judge me in a year,” says Corona. It is unfortunate he did not wait one month.

In the last month, a local official died in the thick of campaigning, the Rose of Tacloban returned as the Iron Butterfly, the yellow juggernaut rolled into the Palace, and a masked man they call The Koala Bear has announced the nation’s most successful polls are a result of his clever paws.

I have tried, long and hard, to write about politics and the press and the usual very odd state of the nation, but the heat feels like a punch to the gut, and I cannot think beyond the next burst of muggy air. This is not a column, or an attempt at a column; this is the product of insomnia and adrenaline withdrawal and a writer who is very often reminded that wearing a leather jacket over pajamas while pretending to be Hunter Thompson is not enough inspiration to fill a thousand-word space.

Every once in a while, on a day like this, when the wall clock decides to stop and the refrigerator drips warm dirty water, it does not matter if you follow ritual. Drank the coffee, had the cookie, read the paper, surfed the Internet, played “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” counted the minutes to deadline, took a shower, wrote a paragraph, deleted a paragraph, took a nap, slicked on red lipstick, wrote a sentence, deleted a sentence—there are too many words and none of them are right. And so, in the grand tradition of writers who cannot write, I will write about writing, and ask for the forgiveness of the sweaty-fingered few who have managed the energy to crack open their Sunday papers.

Yesterday was moving day, one apartment to another, and still I am back in the old room, surrounded by papers and torn books, because this is where I wrote for two years and two months and the tricycles are still rampaging and the neighbors are still hammering and even if the local bets have stopped playing “Eye of the Tiger” every thirteen-and-a-half minutes, I am a creature who requires routine in the writing if not the living, and I cannot face both writer’s block and an unfamiliar wall.

It’s hot today.

You will wonder why I still write, as my complaints have reached the high-pitched hysteria of a Ricky Martin fan who has finally discovered that not only does he live several continents away, his recent announcement has established he will never be the future father of any children.

Understand I have tried many other things. I have bounced in youth television shows and was told the public was unhappy with the shape of my nostrils and the content of my often stunted conversation. I have taught high school and found myself in tears over misplaced semi-colons and a student who insisted that the only proper end to the story of a prostitute is that a prostitute should die and therefore deliver the moral message that the wages of sin are death.

I have tried to be a reporter, and failed miserably, finding in my notes not the deciding factor in the judge’s decision against the suspected murderer, but a description of the pattern of blonde linoleum of the courthouse floor, the number of times the accused stuffed a vial of White Flower up his nose, and the startling fact that the private prosecutor had a photo of his mother in his wallet. In a lunch meeting with columnists and President Macapagal-Arroyo where she broke varying information regarding the press office, the environmental program and the upcoming elections, I went home with the certain knowledge her shoes had gold stiletto heels, her smile was insincere and that her assistant had what may perhaps be described as the world’s most immobile helmet of dyed red hair, and was unable to report any firsthand information regarding the press office, the environmental program and the upcoming elections.

I write because, as E.L. Doctorow says, it is the only socially acceptable form of schizophrenia, and tomorrow I’ll probably write with another of the voices that belong in my head. The world, after all, will occasionally forgive a temperamental writer who cannot write. I will end with the state of my nation. It is a hot afternoon in May, and I cannot write today.

“So far this has been the most peaceful compared to our previous elections,” said AFP Joint Task Force Hope chief Col. Ricardo Nepomuceno in a press briefing at Camp Aguinaldo Monday evening. Just 10 dead, says the gleeful AFP. Successful elections, chirp the Comelec. In Payatas-A, hundreds of voters went home without voting after seven-hour waits, others stayed, demanding for names that have disappeared from lists.

From Maguindanao, New York Times’ Carlos Conde makes a phone call. “They’re shooting around us,” he says, “three, four shots. They’re still shooting.” In Butuan City, Mayor Roberto Luna of Lingig, Surigao del Sur and his four escorts are still being held hostage by the New People’s Army.

Iron butterflies flit past yellow messiahs, the big guns of the provincial mafias ripping their way into congressional honor. The dictator’s daughter and the rapist’s son, their names bright and brilliant in the foot-long ballot. Pampanga gets its own president, Duterte keeps his fiefdom, and a Binay son sits on the Makati throne for the 24th in the tradition of Jejomar Binay’s 21-year reign.

Governor Marcos, Representative Marcos, Senator Marcos, at a time when the son of the assassinated Ninoy Aquino knots his yellow ribbon.

“I thank the Lord, the Ilocanos, the Filipino people for the overwhelming mandate for the Marcoses in spite of all the odds,” former First Lady Imelda Marcos told The Associated Press Wednesday. “The Filipino people can be assured of our selfless and endless service and love to all.”

Governor Dy, Representative Dy and Mayor Dy, triumphant in Isabela, where a limping Grace Padaca said her people had been mauled.

Governor Ortega, Representative Ortega, Mayor Ortega rise from La Union; Governor Garcia, Representative Garcia, and Mayor Garcia wave from Bataan.

There is little talk of party and policy, only family victory and the continuity of a dynasty. In Congress, three seats will represent the family of convicted rapist and former representative Romeo Jalosjos, and in the Senate, the preliminary list is a rogue’s gallery of incumbents and action stars, carrying the same names that have peopled the Senate roll call for years. Enrile, Defensor-Santiago and Estrada will dance with Sotto, Lapid and the eternal Ramon “Bong” Revilla—described in his official Senate biography as “the handsome movie star.”

Welcome to elections 2010, where media companies argue over hologram effects, opinion columns are denounced for bias, and a survey company sues a presidential candidate for moral damages (right after Dick Gordon sued the Social Weather Stations for false results). Candidates concede, and withdraw concessions the next day, while a priest reports a police officer stood smoking as shots rang out.

Six days after the automated elections, and the final numbers are still pending. Transmission problems, says the Comelec. On television, the almost-president defends the controversial sister who promised to leave if her brother is elected president. “If my sister leaves, the lives of my nephews will be disrupted. For what reason? What did she do? What are the allegations that she did wrong? There is no allegation but they want punishment; I don’t think that’s fair,” he says. Neither will the voters who voted on the basis of that promise, made by a woman who once made her congressman-brother act as her spokesperson during her fight with ex-lover Joey Marquez. It is an interesting defense by the Aquino son, who may yet announce that his family did no wrong in keeping Hacienda Luisita.

Six days after the elections. Names have been proclaimed, winners announced, and still there is no way to tell if the ballots match the numbers. The chairman behind the Random Manual Audit says it may take over a month, with only a small percentage of the 1,145 precincts delaying in the delivery of reports to the Commission on Elections in Manila. Sixty-five PCOS machines found in an Antipolo home. “Company policy,” says Smartmatic president for Asia Pacific Cesar Flores—the technician simply wanted to store them in a more secure place. The twitter accounts are quieter. The dead have been written off. The president-elect is holding his sister’s hand.

In Payatas-A Elementary School, a PCOS machine breaks down, a sweating crowd mutters outside the classroom, and an English teacher climbs up on a chair. “We have three options, people. You can trust us with your ballots, and we’ll feed them to another machine at 6 p.m. You can come back when the machine is fixed, or if the Comelec sends a replacement. Or you can choose not to vote.” Her name is Hellen Hilario. When she speaks, the voters listen. And when she hears that the Comelec had withdrawn the ban on teachers voting outside their precincts, she stands up, glowing with sweat, bright-eyed and gleeful, and announces to all and sundry that she too could vote. At 7:30 that night, she feeds her own vote into her PCOS machine. She is one of millions who stand for the vote, who deserve more vigilance than just company policy and a “speedy” election.

Six days after the elections, six more years to go.