“What do you make of this, Kuya?” my younger brother Ambo, auxiliary bishop of San Fernando, Pampanga, asked me last Monday, as he showed me an envelope addressed to him containing the campaign leaflet of a party-list nominee and a crisp P200 bill. “All the other priests at my parish got the same envelope through … Read more

In an ideal world, how would the recent shooting by the Philippine Coast Guard of a Taiwanese fishing boat, which resulted in the killing of one of the fishermen, have been handled?  I think that both Filipino and Taiwanese authorities might have immediately sought one another to express grave concern over the incident, and to … Read more

Electing public officials is the most important act of any citizen in any democracy. Here we choose people who will have the power to make decisions that bind all of us. If we try to do it rationally, we will find that it is also one of the most complex things we can do in … Read more

It is a testimony to the undifferentiated nature of our political system that many other social institutions are mobilized during elections.  There’s the family, there’s religion, there’s the business sector, and then there’s the science of surveys.  Their chief purveyors try to convert the power they wield into the currency of politics.  We are disturbed … Read more

The rise in the number of unemployed Filipinos in the midst of economic growth has made our government officials take a serious look at the current economic strategy. This pattern of jobless growth partly explains why the level of mass poverty in our country has remained unchanged even as the economy seems to be growing. … Read more

Some moral progress is noticeable in the way we now refer to our house help, though not always in the way we treat them. First we called them alila (servant), a term that recalls the feudal culture from which it was drawn.  Then for a long time they were simply referred to as katulong (house … Read more

Preelection surveys do often take the form of self-fulfilling oracles. This happens when voters find the published results so compelling as to make them vote according to the predictions. The opposite, of course, can happen. Voters may react to survey results in such a way as to be motivated to prevent them from being realized … Read more

Bizarre as it is, politicians running for local positions have come to accept it as part of the political reality: that in some remote Philippine communities, candidates must secure a clearance from armed illegal groups before they can enter an area and campaign. The permit to campaign is normally given in exchange for a cash … Read more

I had strong reservations about going on a long motorcycle ride in this sweltering summer heat.  When you are on a bike and you are going fast, you don’t notice you are sweating. The water your body secretes to cool you down evaporates in the wind as quickly as it forms on the skin. Dehydration … Read more

It’s one of those moments in a democracy when we’re reminded that the rights of citizenship come with corresponding duties. I refer to the fact that the deadline for the filing of income tax returns this year came just a month before the midterm elections. This fortuitous sequencing of two vital events that mark our … Read more