Originally published in Manila Bulletin There is a particular loneliness in grief when distance stands between sorrow and farewell. For me, that loneliness is made sharper by the fact that, because of travel restrictions, I cannot go home to pay my respects to a man I deeply admired. And so I do what writers have always done when presence is denied them: I turn to words, inadequate though they may be, and hope they are enough to honor Edgard Cabangon. I first met him when I was still in college. In the years that followed — nearly 15 of them — he became a mentor to me. Even from afar, and even in the brief intervals of my study breaks, his presence remained constant in my life. I always looked forward to visiting him and his partner, Sharon Tan. Those visits were never empty social calls. They were moments of warmth, generosity, and quiet learning that I came to value deeply. What struck me most about him was not simply that he was wise, but that he wore his wisdom lightly. He was humble and welcoming, never imposing, never theatrical. Each time I saw him, I came away with something worth keeping — a brief insight, a practical truth, a small but lasting nugget of wisdom. Some people fill a room with power; he filled it with calm, with thoughtfulness, with a kind of dignity that asked for no attention and yet naturally earned respect. I admired him for that. I remember especially how he would ask me about law school. It was never a perfunctory question, never mere politeness. He genuinely wanted to know how I was doing, how I was enduring, whether I was pressing on. And always, in one form or another, he would remind me that there was nothing more important than finishing school. It was advice delivered without fanfare, but with the force of conviction. He knew the value of perseverance, and he wanted others to know it too. When he spoke about his own days at UST Law, the conversations would often turn light. We would laugh about the peculiar burdens of law students — the exhaustion, the absurdities, the endless small trials that somehow become part of one’s formation. But beneath the humor was something deeper: the understanding that struggle has its purpose, and that endurance, in the end, shapes character. That was his gift as a mentor. He did not merely instruct; he encouraged. He did not simply speak; he invested himself in the lives of others. In a world where many are eager to be heard, he was one of those rare men whose words carried weight because they came from sincerity, discipline, and care. The public will rightly remember Edgard Cabangon for the breadth of his work, for the institutions he led, and for the responsibilities he carried with distinction. But those of us fortunate enough to have known him personally will remember something that cannot be measured by titles or enterprises. We will remember his humility. We will remember his warmth. We will remember the quiet constancy with which he guided, encouraged, and believed in others. It is a painful thing not to be home at a time like this. There is a helplessness in absence that no explanation can soften. Yet perhaps remembrance, honestly offered, is also a form of presence. Perhaps gratitude, set down in words, can travel where we cannot. So I offer these words for the man I admired, for the mentor who stayed with me through the years, and for the kindness I will always remember. May Edgard Cabangon rest in peace. This opinion column is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share, adapt, and redistribute this content, provided appropriate credit is given to the author and original source.

Originally published in Manila Bulletin I have seen war through the eyes of my classmates—people who come from countries that are currently in conflict. They don’t always talk about it directly. Sometimes it’s a silence that arrives when the conversation turns to “home,” or a pause when someone’s phone lights up with a message they’re afraid to open. Sometimes it’s the way they carry ordinary moments with a kind of quiet alertness, as if their bodies learned a different definition of normal long before they ever walked into a classroom like this one. In their eyes, I’ve seen courage and hope. I’ve also seen sadness, fear, and a bravery that isn’t cinematic. It doesn’t look like heroic speeches or dramatic music. It looks like showing up to class after a sleepless night because your family is in a place where sirens aren’t rare. It looks like studying for an exam while the group chat back home fills with updates you can’t control. It looks like laughing at a joke, and then suddenly remembering that someone you love is not laughing tonight. War does something cruel: it narrows the world. It reduces your future into short-term calculations. It turns the simplest things—electricity, water, a safe route home—into questions without guaranteed answers. It makes time feel unstable. Plans become “if” statements. People begin to speak in contingencies: if the border opens, if the internet holds, if the checkpoint is calm, if my brother replies. When you live close enough to conflict, uncertainty isn’t a temporary inconvenience. It becomes a way of breathing. And yet, what astonishes me is how my classmates still manage to widen the world again. They carry hope not as a naïve optimism, but as a deliberate act. A form of resistance. A refusal to let violence rewrite every meaning in their lives. They still dream. They still make friends. They still build skills for a future that war insists might not exist. That is bravery. Not the loud kind, but the stubborn kind. Watching them has changed how I think about peace. A lot of society treats peace as passive, like it’s the absence of action: no fighting, no shouting, no disruption. Peace gets framed as soft, a luxury you can afford only when “real” power has already been secured. But from the eyes that have seen war, peace looks nothing like weakness. Peace looks like strength. Peace looks like discipline. Peace looks like dignity. Because violence is easy to glorify. It comes with dramatic narratives: enemies, victories, revenge, righteousness. Violence provides a simple storyline for complicated problems. It offers a shortcut for leaders who don’t want to govern and for movements that don’t want to negotiate. It tempts us into believing that force equals clarity. But force rarely resolves the deeper conditions that create conflict. It mostly spreads pain and calls it proof. Peace is harder. Peace asks for patience in a world that rewards speed. It asks for restraint when anger feels satisfying. It asks for courage without the adrenaline rush. Peace requires people to do the unglamorous work of building systems: diplomacy, agreements, accountability, institutions that can survive our moods. Peace demands that we treat human beings as human beings even when we are afraid. Especially when we are afraid. This is why I believe society should learn to see strength in peace. There is nothing more dignified than retaining peace—not as a slogan, but as a practice. Dignity is refusing to dehumanize. Dignity is choosing not to turn someone else’s suffering into entertainment, not to scroll past tragedy like it’s a weather update. Dignity is recognizing that a person running from war is not a “problem” to manage, but a human being carrying a story that could have been ours. In a classroom, you can’t hide behind abstractions. War is not a map with arrows. It’s the friend next to you who suddenly speaks more softly when the news mentions their city. It’s the classmate who becomes an expert in time zones because they’re always calculating whether it’s safe to call home. It’s the person who celebrates a small victory—a family member reaching a safer area, a message arriving after hours of silence—with an intensity that makes you realize how casually you’ve been taking your own safety. I’ve learned that peace is not something we “have.” It’s something we do. It’s a set of choices, repeated until they become culture. We do peace when we refuse propaganda that tries to convince us some lives matter less. We do peace when we challenge the casual jokes that turn entire peoples into stereotypes. We do peace when we stop rewarding cruelty as if it were competence. We do peace when we make room for complexity instead of demanding a single villain and a single solution. We do peace when we insist that facts matter, because when truth collapses, cooperation collapses with it—and without cooperation, the future becomes a battlefield of competing fantasies. We do peace when we support the slow, frustrating, necessary work of preventing conflict: addressing inequality, protecting human rights, building resilience against climate disasters, investing in education, keeping channels of dialogue open even when it feels easier to shut doors. Peace is not just moral; it’s practical. It is the infrastructure of survival. And peace is also intimate. It lives in how we treat the people closest to us. If our first instinct in disagreement is to humiliate, to “win,” to reduce someone to a caricature, we rehearse the same patterns that scale up into societal division. The seeds of conflict are often planted in everyday contempt. The seeds of peace are planted in everyday respect. My classmates’ eyes remind me that the cost of war is not theoretical. It is lived. It is sleepless nights, fractured families, interrupted education, stolen childhoods, and futures forced into exile. When you understand that cost—even a fraction of it—you stop romanticizing violence. You stop calling peace “idealistic” as if idealism were a flaw. Wanting peace is not naïve. Pretending war is normal is naïve. I don’t know what history will write about our era. But I do know this: we are living in a time when humanity’s power is immense, and the consequences of our failures travel fast. That makes peace more urgent, not less. Peace is not the opposite of strength. Peace is strength with a conscience. So when I think of dignity, I don’t picture dominance. I picture restraint. I picture the hard work of protecting life. I picture the quiet bravery of the people who have lost so much and still choose hope. And I picture the eyes that have seen war—still looking forward, still insisting, in a thousand small ways, that the world can be wider than violence. This opinion column is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share, adapt, and redistribute this content, provided appropriate credit is given to the author and original source.

Originally published in Manila Bulletin Peace is the word we reach for when something breaks. We say it at podiums, stitch it onto banners, whisper it at hospital bedsides and graves. But most days we treat peace like a background setting—like it will simply remain on if we don’t touch the controls. That is the first mistake. Peace isn’t a default. Peace is a construction project, and it needs constant maintenance. History doesn’t repeat itself exactly, but it does rhyme, especially when we grow lazy about the lessons. The frightening thing about our era is not that we face some cosmic threat we can’t understand. It’s that the dangers most capable of ending us are familiar: fear turned into policy, pride turned into violence, greed turned into pollution, cleverness untethered from wisdom. We don’t need a meteor to erase ourselves. We are fully capable of doing it with our own hands, one “reasonable” decision at a time. For most of human history, our worst instincts were limited by our tools. We could harm each other, certainly, but the radius of destruction was smaller. Now our tools amplify everything. We can split atoms, engineer pathogens, manipulate ecosystems, and build machines that shape attention at planetary scale. Our power has grown faster than our maturity. That mismatch is where the danger lives. And yet I’m writing about peace, because peace is the only frame wide enough to hold all these threats at once. Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is the presence of conditions that make war—and collapse, and cruelty—less likely. It is the habit of seeing other people as fully human, even when politics invites us to see them as obstacles or enemies. It is the discipline of building guardrails around our power. If we are honest, the risk of self-inflicted catastrophe often looks ordinary up close. It looks like leaders rewarded for aggression because aggression reads as strength. It looks like institutions weakened until nobody trusts elections, courts, science, or each other. It looks like a public sphere where truth becomes optional, replaced by narratives engineered for outrage and profit. It looks like a warming world in which droughts and floods displace millions, and desperate people become convenient scapegoats. It looks like new technologies deployed first and governed later—if ever—because “move fast” is easier than “move carefully.” None of this arrives with a trumpet. It arrives with paperwork, headlines, slogans, and shrugs. Catastrophe is often the sum of small abdications: the moment we say, “That’s not my problem,” and then say it again, and then build a culture around saying it. Peace, in contrast, asks for commitment. Not the sentimental kind—candles and speeches, though those can matter—but the practical kind. Peace is logistics. Peace is diplomacy funded and staffed like it matters, not treated as decoration. Peace is treaties that reduce the chance of miscalculation, verification systems that work even when trust is thin, and channels of communication kept open especially when relations are worst. Peace is recognizing that climate action is not only environmental; it’s conflict prevention. A hotter planet means more scarcity, more displacement, more instability, and more leaders tempted to turn fear into nationalism and nationalism into violence. Peace is also public health, because pandemics are not just medical events; they are social stress tests. Peace is resilient infrastructure, because fragile grids and fragile supply chains turn crises into chaos. Peace is education that teaches not only facts, but discernment: how to tell the difference between evidence and manipulation, between a real person and a target painted by propaganda. Peace is media systems that reward accuracy over adrenaline, and citizens who refuse to let their nervous systems be hijacked for clicks. But peace is not only built in capitals. It is built in kitchens, classrooms, group chats, and neighborhoods. It begins in how we speak about people who are different from us. Every time we reduce a human being to a stereotype, we loosen a brick in the foundation. Every time we choose curiosity over contempt, we tighten it again. A society that cannot disagree without dehumanizing is a society walking toward violence. It may start with insults and boycotts and “jokes,” but it rarely ends there. Hope matters here, but not as a mood. Hope is not a bright feeling that floats down on good days. Hope is a practice: acting as if your actions matter even when you can’t guarantee outcomes. Hope is voting like institutions are worth protecting. Hope is showing up locally—volunteering, organizing, helping a neighbor—so that “we” becomes more than an online tribe. Hope is supporting journalists, scientists, teachers, and civil servants who keep reality anchored. Hope is demanding that corporations and governments treat safety as sacred when they build systems that influence minds, money, and security. Hope is also personal. It is apologizing when you’re wrong. It is refusing to share the most inflammatory version of a story just because it flatters your side. It is learning to sit with complexity instead of reaching for a scapegoat. These things sound small, but extinction is built out of “small” things repeated at scale: small lies, small cruelties, small permissions granted to the worst impulses. We do not need to be perfect to survive. We need to be mature enough to match our power. That means insisting on ethics as a design requirement, not an afterthought. It means asking “Should we?” as loudly as we ask “Can we?” It means building cultures that reward restraint, foresight, and care—qualities that rarely go viral, but keep civilizations alive. I don’t want the final story of our species to be that we were brilliant, connected, and breathtakingly creative—and still couldn’t outgrow our hunger for dominance, our addiction to outrage, our habit of treating the future as expendable. I want a different story: that we looked at the edge and stepped back. That we learned, in time, that peace is not softness. Peace is strength with a conscience. History doesn’t have to repeat itself. It doesn’t even have to rhyme. But it will, if we let fear and ego hold the pen. So let’s keep the pen. Let’s write peace into our systems and our speech, into our technologies and our treaties, into our daily choices. And let’s practice hope like it’s a form of responsibility—because in a world where we can end ourselves, responsibility is the most radical kind of love. This opinion column is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share, adapt, and redistribute this content, provided appropriate credit is given to the author and original source.

Originally published in Manila Bulletin If you want to understand inequality in Manila, don’t begin with income statistics. Don’t begin with GDP growth or ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Begin with a wheelchair. Or a trolley. Or a supermarket cart. Or a leg in a cast. Or a stroller. Better yet, I challenge our public officials—city mayors, councilors, barangay captains, transport regulators, engineers—and anyone who believes Manila is “moving forward” to spend just one full day navigating the streets using any of these. No convoy. No assistants clearing the way. No advance team fixing the route. Just you and the sidewalk. Try crossing Taft Avenue during rush hour. Try rolling along España Boulevard where sidewalks narrow into obstacle courses of parked motorcycles and electric posts. Try maneuvering through Divisoria’s crowded alleys. Try reaching a public hospital, a government office, or even a mall entrance without assistance. You will not last long. Because Manila, despite its vibrancy and resilience, remains deeply hostile to anyone who moves differently—or who simply needs wheels beneath them. Sidewalks are cracked, missing, or abruptly end. Ramps are too steep, blocked, or purely decorative. Footbridges demand stair-climbing athleticism. Pedestrian crossings fade into invisibility. Drainage grates trap small wheels. Vendors, signboards, and parked vehicles reclaim whatever walking space remains. Now imagine pushing a stroller through that maze. Imagine lifting it up broken curbs while your baby sleeps inside. Imagine squeezing between jeepneys and concrete barriers. Imagine stepping down into traffic because the sidewalk disappears. Imagine doing this daily—not as a social experiment—but as your life. For persons with disabilities (PWDs), senior citizens, parents pushing strollers, delivery workers pulling carts, and even someone temporarily injured with a cast, the city becomes a battlefield. Each curb is a wall. Each intersection is a gamble. Each errand requires strategy. And yet, our laws are clear. The Accessibility Law—Batas Pambansa Blg. 344—requires that public buildings and infrastructure be accessible. The Magna Carta for Disabled Persons reinforces this commitment. Accessibility is not optional. It is mandated. But a law that exists only on paper is not a ramp—it is a promise left unbuilt. Accessibility is not charity. It is not a “special accommodation.” It is not an aesthetic add-on to impress donors. It is basic infrastructure. When we build a city that works for wheelchair users, we build a city that works for everyone. Smooth, continuous sidewalks benefit seniors and toddlers learning to walk. Proper curb ramps help parents with strollers and delivery riders hauling goods. Audible crossing signals assist the visually impaired and distracted pedestrians alike. Wider walkways reduce congestion for everyone. Universal design is not expensive excess—it is intelligent planning. The problem is not ignorance of engineering standards. The problem is the absence of empathy in execution. Urban planning in Manila often prioritizes vehicles over people. Flyovers rise quickly; sidewalks crumble slowly. Parking space is fiercely defended; pedestrian space is casually sacrificed. Roads are widened; accessibility is narrowed. We measure progress in traffic flow for cars—not in freedom of movement for human beings. What would happen if every public project required its proponents to physically test it—using a wheelchair, pushing a stroller, or navigating with crutches—before approval? What if every ribbon-cutting were preceded by a mobility audit conducted by PWD groups and parents? What if accessibility compliance were enforced as strictly as fire codes? What if our leaders had to experience the city without privilege? The truth is simple: A city that excludes is a city that shrinks itself. When PWDs cannot commute safely, we lose workers, students, and entrepreneurs. When seniors stay home because sidewalks are treacherous, we lose participation and wisdom. When parents avoid public spaces because pushing a stroller feels dangerous, we lose community life. When mobility becomes exhausting, productivity suffers. Inclusion is not only moral—it is practical economics. Manila prides itself on resilience. We celebrate adaptability. But resilience should not mean citizens must constantly adjust to broken systems. True resilience is designing systems that do not break people in the first place. So here is the challenge. Spend one day navigating Manila not as a VIP, but as a vulnerable pedestrian. Push a stroller over uneven pavement. Roll a wheelchair across cracked sidewalks. Pull a trolley through a narrow footbridge. Cross a busy avenue with one leg in a cast. Then ask yourself: Is this the city we want? Because a truly progressive Manila is not defined by its skylines or shopping malls. It is defined by whether its most vulnerable residents can move freely, safely, and with dignity. A city you cannot walk—or roll a stroller—through is a city that fails. And until we build Manila for everyone, we have not built it at all. This opinion column is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share, adapt, and redistribute this content, provided appropriate credit is given to the author and original source.

Originally published in Manila Bulletin A city does not end at sunset. When lecture halls empty and office lights flicker off, another pulse begins. Cafés soften their lighting. Musicians tune their instruments. Conversations stretch longer. In that space between obligation and rest, creativity finds oxygen. This is the nighttime economy—and it is far more than entertainment. Consider Oxford after dark. By day, it is defined by spires, libraries, and the steady rhythm of scholarship. But step into the evening, and you will find something equally important to its identity: its pubs. Among them stands the Lamb & Flag, a modest stone building tucked into a narrow lane. For centuries, students have gathered there after tutorials and exams. They debate politics, literature, philosophy. They argue, dream, confess ambitions. Decades later—sometimes generations later—they return, standing at the same wooden bar, remembering who they were when ideas first began to take shape. That continuity matters. The Lamb & Flag is not merely a place that serves drinks. It is a living archive of intellectual life. It has welcomed figures like John Dryden and Charles Dickens. In the twentieth century, members of the Inklings—most notably J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis—were known to gather in Oxford pubs, including the Lamb & Flag and its neighbors, to read drafts, exchange critiques, and shape stories that would define modern fantasy literature. Imagine those evenings. Manuscripts unfolded over pints. Lines revised mid-conversation. Worlds like Middle-earth sharpened not in isolation, but in community. That is the power of nighttime spaces. They are where hierarchy loosens. Professors sit beside undergraduates. Novelists share tables with scientists. The formalities of the day give way to candor. Ideas become less guarded, more experimental. Failure feels safer. Historically, creative movements have often been born not in formal institutions but in after-hours gatherings. Jazz grew in clubs. Modernist poetry circulated in cafés. Tech startups began as late-night brainstorms. The nighttime economy provides the informal infrastructure that formal systems cannot. It is also economically significant. Evening activity generates employment across layers of society—hospitality workers, performers, security staff, kitchen crews, drivers, technicians. It supports small entrepreneurs and independent venues. It keeps city centers alive beyond business hours, making them safer through presence and movement. A place that empties at 6 p.m. does not feel dynamic. It feels unfinished. Tourism, too, depends on nighttime vibrancy. Visitors rarely travel simply to see office buildings. They travel for atmosphere—for the glow of lights reflected on old stone, for live music spilling into streets, for markets and festivals that extend beyond daylight. But nighttime vitality does not happen by accident. It requires thoughtful policy. Cities must balance safety with spontaneity. That means well-lit streets without over-policing creativity. Reliable late-night transport so workers and students can move safely. Licensing systems that protect neighborhoods while not strangling small venues with excessive bureaucracy. Some cities have even appointed “night mayors” to advocate for after-dark culture. The recognition is clear: the night deserves governance, not suspicion. Too often, however, nighttime activity is treated as a problem to control rather than an asset to cultivate. Early curfews, restrictive permits, and indifference to independent venues slowly drain creative ecosystems. When small spaces close, it is not just a business that disappears—it is a network. Oxford’s pubs endure because they are woven into the city’s intellectual identity. Generations of students return because those spaces hold memory. They represent continuity—a bridge between centuries of thought. When former students step again into the Lamb & Flag, they do not simply order a drink. They reconnect with the version of themselves that once stayed up late arguing about books, politics, and possibility. A vibrant nighttime economy sustains that cycle. It allows new generations to inherit not just buildings, but living traditions of exchange. A city that invests in its night invests in its imagination. Because when the sun sets, creativity does not sleep. It gathers. It questions. It builds friendships that later become collaborations. It shapes manuscripts, movements, and memories. And the cities that understand this—those that protect their after-dark spaces as carefully as their landmarks—remain magnetic across centuries. The night keeps a place creative. The night keeps it alive. This opinion column is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share, adapt, and redistribute this content, provided appropriate credit is given to the author and original source.

Originally published in Manila Bulletin There is a particular electricity in an unexpected encounter. You turn a corner and see an old friend you haven’t thought about in years. You duck into a café to escape the rain and overhear a conversation that shifts your thinking. You sit on a public bench and find yourself talking to someone whose life seems entirely unlike yours—until it isn’t. These moments feel accidental. But they are rarely random. They are made possible by the environments we build. Serendipity is often described as luck, a happy coincidence bestowed by fate. Yet in cities, it is also infrastructure. It depends on density, proximity, and shared space. It depends on streets and squares that invite lingering rather than rushing. For most of human history, daily life unfolded in common view. Markets were not just places to buy goods; they were social theaters. Plazas and town greens acted as civic glue. The street was a living room without walls. One encountered neighbors not by scheduling them, but by stepping outside. Modern urban development disrupted that pattern. Zoning separated homes from workplaces and retail. Highways privileged speed over presence. Suburban expansion stretched daily life across great distances, turning the private automobile into a necessity. Later, digital technology allowed us to meet needs without meeting one another. Groceries arrive at the door. Meetings happen on screens. Entertainment streams into our hands. Convenience expanded. But something quieter diminished: the chance encounter. These small, unscripted interactions are not ornamental. They are foundational. When people share space casually and repeatedly—on sidewalks, in parks, at transit stops—they accumulate familiarity. Familiarity breeds trust. Trust makes pluralism livable. Disagreement becomes less abstract when it has a face. The urbanist Jane Jacobs argued in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” that lively sidewalks and mixed-use neighborhoods create the informal social networks that keep communities vibrant. Beneath that claim lies a broader truth: Vitality arises not from grand design but from the steady choreography of everyday overlap. Cities work best when they enable people to see and recognize one another in ordinary time. If serendipity matters, it must be designed for. First, walkability is essential. A city experienced at three miles per hour offers far more opportunity for surprise than one experienced at 30. Wide sidewalks, short blocks, street trees, benches, and active storefronts encourage lingering. When movement slows, attention widens. People notice each other. Second, genuinely public spaces are crucial. Not all gathering spots are equal. Spaces that require a purchase subtly limit who belongs. Parks, libraries, community centers, and plazas create common ground where income and occupation recede, at least temporarily. Movable chairs, communal tables, playgrounds, and small performance areas encourage not just co-presence but conversation. Third, mixed-use neighborhoods multiply chance. When housing, shops, schools, and workplaces exist side by side, daily rhythms overlap. The parent grabbing coffee runs into the teacher. The freelancer overhears an idea. The retiree on a stoop becomes a familiar presence. These repeated contacts weave a social fabric no app can replicate. Serendipity also requires safety—both physical and psychological. People must feel comfortable lingering and being seen. Good lighting, active street fronts, and attentive maintenance contribute to that ease. So does inclusive programming: farmers markets, outdoor concerts, neighborhood festivals. Such events do not manufacture connection, but they lower the threshold for it. In an era shaped by algorithms, our interactions are curated with precision. We are shown what we already like and connected to those who resemble us. The friction of difference is smoothed away. Yet democracy depends on a measure of productive friction—the encounter with the unexpected. Cities counterbalance digital sorting with physical randomness. You cannot fully predict who will sit beside you on a bus or stand next to you in a park. Shared urban spaces insist that we inhabit a world larger than our preferences. No planner can command genuine connection. Serendipity resists scheduling. But unpredictability flourishes within supportive conditions. A welldesigned city makes room for human surprise. Cities are not merely collections of buildings or engines of economic output. They are stages for encounter. Their wealth lies in the density of unplanned human contact—the conversations at crosswalks, the laughter from adjacent tables, the recognition of familiar faces. When we design streets, transit systems, and public rooms that invite people to cross paths, we affirm a simple idea: Community is not programmed; it is stumbled upon. And sometimes, in the most ordinary moment—waiting for a light to change or sheltering from the rain—the city quietly introduces us to someone, or something, that alters the course of our day. That is not luck alone. It is urban design doing its quiet work. This opinion column is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share, adapt, and redistribute this content, provided appropriate credit is given to the author and original source.

Originally published in Manila Bulletin If you want to know whether a city is truly working, don’t start by asking the happiest commuters or the residents with the most options. Start with the people the city fails first: those with the least money, the least power, the least time, the least safety, and the fewest ways to “just make it work.” Design a city for them, and you don’t just build a kinder place—you build a city that functions better for everyone. This is the logic behind a simple test: if it works for elders and young children, it works for everyone. The same holds—often even more urgently—for people with disabilities, people experiencing homelessness, migrants and refugees, low-wage workers, single parents, and communities historically pushed to the edges. Marginalization isn’t a niche issue. It’s a stress test. And our cities are failing it. Consider what daily life looks like when you’re living on the thinnest margin. A missed bus isn’t an inconvenience—it’s a lost shift and a smaller paycheck. A poorly lit street isn’t “a little sketchy”—it’s a route you avoid, even if it adds an hour to your commute. A lack of public toilets isn’t an annoyance—it’s a health risk, an indignity, a reason to stay home. When sidewalks are broken, when crossings are too long, when ramps are missing, when services are scattered and confusing, the cost is paid in time, injury, money, and fear. That cost is concentrated on the people who can least afford it. Meanwhile, the solutions that support the most marginalized are rarely exotic. They are practical, ordinary, and overdue: safe sidewalks and protected crossings. Frequent, reliable public transit that runs early, late, and everywhere—not just where it’s profitable. Housing that is genuinely affordable, stable, and close to jobs and schools. Public restrooms. Shade and benches. Streetlights that work. Community health clinics within reach. Schools and childcare that don’t require a second job’s worth of logistics. A city that can be navigated without a car, without constant vigilance, without a smartphone battery that never dies. These changes sound small until you count what they return. When you build a neighborhood where a child can walk to school safely, you’ve built a neighborhood where an elder can walk to the pharmacy without risking a fall or a speeding car. When you make transit legible and frequent enough for a low-wage worker to depend on, you’ve made it easier for everyone to leave the car at home. When you ensure sidewalks are accessible for wheelchair users, you’ve improved life for parents pushing strollers, people hauling groceries, delivery workers, travelers pulling luggage, and anyone nursing an injury. Universal design isn’t charity. It’s competence. The moral case is obvious: people deserve dignity. But even if your heart doesn’t move, the math should. Cities that ignore marginalization spend more on crisis than care—more on emergency rooms than clinics, more on policing than prevention, more on temporary shelters than permanent housing. We build systems that “save” money by withholding basics, then pay a premium when predictably, preventably, people fall through the cracks. The costs don’t disappear; they compound. There’s also a democracy argument here. A city designed for the most privileged treats everyone else as an afterthought. That’s not just unfair—it’s unstable. When residents feel the city is not for them, trust erodes. People disengage, or they lash out, or they leave if they can. Social fabric frays when public space sends an unspoken message: you don’t belong. Designing for the marginalized is a way of saying: this city is yours, too. Belonging is infrastructure. And let’s be honest about what “marginalized” often means in practice: people who are asked to be invisible. This opinion column is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share, adapt, and redistribute this content, provided appropriate credit is given to the author and original source.

Originally published in Manila Bulletin The newest assessment snapshots should end the era of excuses. Filipino learners are not mastering foundational skills early, and gaps widen with every grade. If we read the data honestly, one reform rises to the top in a multilingual country—teach children first in the language they use at home. EDCOM 2’s analysis of DepEd standardized assessments (2023–2025) shows a sharp decline in the share of learners rated “proficient” to “highly proficient” as they advance through basic education. In 2024, the Early Language, Literacy, and Numeracy Assessment (ELLNA) found only 30.52 percent of Grade 3 learners reached proficiency. That means roughly seven in 10 Grade 3 children still struggle with basics: recognizing letters and sounds, reading common words, understanding short passages, counting independently, and solving simple numerical problems. By Grade 6, the 2024 National Achievement Test snapshot shows proficiency falling to 19.56 percent—about one in five. These are not just percentages; they are doors closing. EDCOM 2 notes that nearly half of learners are not reading at grade level by the end of Grade 3, and that disadvantage hardens into a learning gap of 5.5 years by age 15. International results echo the same story: by age 15, 76 percent of Filipino students score below minimum proficiency in Reading (PISA), and UNICEF and the World Bank report that 91 percent of late-primary-age children cannot read and understand a simple story. DepEd Order No. 55, s. 2016 exists precisely to prevent denial. It requires system-level assessments by key stage, administered to representative samples, to monitor whether students are meeting learning standards and to guide priorities and reforms. The assessments are doing their job: they are revealing, in plain numbers, a system-wide failure to secure the basics early. We should also interpret labels carefully. Under current rules, students scoring at least 75 percent are deemed “proficient” or “highly proficient,” while 50–74 percent is “nearly proficient.” A PIDS study commissioned by EDCOM 2 suggests that standard-setting methods could classify more students as proficient than the current 75 percent threshold—hinting that the bar may be miscalibrated. But even if we adjust cut scores, the pattern remains: too many children cannot read well enough, early enough, to keep up. So where do reforms begin? Start with the most basic question: do children understand the language of instruction? The Philippines is not monolingual. Children arrive at school making sense of the world in Cebuano, Ilocano, Waray, Hiligaynon, Kapampangan, Tausug, Chavacano, Tagalog, and dozens of other languages—often mixed naturally. Yet many are expected to begin reading, problem-solving, and “comprehending” in a school language that is not the one they use at home. When the language is unfamiliar, learners spend mental energy translating instead of learning. Reading acquisition slows, comprehension weakens, and math becomes a vocabulary test rather than a logic exercise. In the early grades, this language mismatch can be the first shove down a slope that ends in years of accumulated loss. Teaching in the home language is not anti-Filipino or anti-English. It is pro-learning. The goal is not to keep children in one language; it is to give them a strong foundation—decoding, fluency, comprehension, and confidence—so they can transfer those skills to Filipino and English more effectively. Strong first-language literacy is a bridge, not a barrier. What would a serious “teach in the language of home” reform look like? First, make early-grade instruction language-realistic. In Kindergarten to Grade 3, prioritize literacy and numeracy teaching in the dominant community language or the learner’s most used home language, while building oral Filipino and oral English daily. Transition to reading and writing in Filipino and English should be planned and paced—never abrupt, never assumed. Second, fund materials that match policy: decodable readers, graded texts, teacher guides, and assessments in the local language. Without these, teachers will revert to whatever exists, aligned or not. Third, train and coach teachers for multilingual classrooms. Teachers need practical support on teaching early reading in the local language, using code-switching strategically to build meaning, bridging vocabulary across languages, and spotting reading difficulties early. Fourth, diagnose early and intervene fast. Use diagnostics in the language of instruction to identify who cannot decode and who cannot comprehend. Pair this with sustained remediation so Grade 3 is not the point where gaps harden into permanent disadvantage. Finally, prioritize the most vulnerable. In GIDA and Last Mile Schools, the most recent assessments show only 0.13 percent of Grade 12 learners reached proficiency, with none highly proficient. These schools need the strongest support first: smaller instructional groups, specialized literacy assistance, adequate learning resources, and consistent coaching. The data is already telling us where the crisis begins: the earliest grades. Multiculturalism, in education, is not just a celebration of identity. It is a design principle: teach in the language children understand, secure the foundations early, and then build multilingual mastery with confidence. Read the data—and institute reforms that match who our learners are. We can’t afford another lost cohort, period. This opinion column is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share, adapt, and redistribute this content, provided appropriate credit is given to the author and original source.

Originally published in Manila Bulletin In a multi-party democracy like ours, the math of governance is never simple. In the House of Representatives, more than 300 legislators bring with them different parties, loyalties, regions, advocacies—and, inevitably, different ambitions. Majorities can be built, yes, but they can also be brittle: loud on opening day, fractured by the next crisis. That is why the passing of former House Speaker Jose “Joe” de Venecia Jr.—“JDV” to colleagues and “Manong Joe” to many who learned politics at his elbow—feels like the closing of a chapter. He died on Feb. 10 at 89. And with him goes a style of leadership that believed consensus was not a slogan but a discipline. Speaker JDV’s record is easy to recite and hard to match: seven terms as a congressman, and five terms as Speaker—an unprecedented run in the postwar Congress. But numbers alone don’t explain why he mattered. What made JDV “Speaker Joe” was his instinct for coalition as a form of nation-building. The Senate captured this best when it honored him in 2024, recalling how he organized the “Rainbow Coalition,” a broad alliance that helped promote unity and stability during the turbulent post–Martial Law years. The phrase can sound quaint today—rainbows and coalitions, as if politics were merely about colors and seating arrangements. Yet in that difficult era, stabilizing the House meant stabilizing the country: ensuring budgets passed, reforms moved, and democratic institutions gained muscle instead of merely rhetoric. Under his stewardship, more than 200 economic, political, and social reform laws were passed during the Fidel V. Ramos administration, laying groundwork that would shape the country’s economic direction for years. You didn’t always have to agree with JDV to recognize the craft: He understood that legislation is rarely the triumph of one perfect idea, but the patient weaving together of enough “yes” votes to make progress real. And he did not build coalitions in the abstract. He built them around concrete measures that touched ordinary lives—even when the impact was not immediately visible. Take the Dollar Remittance Program for overseas Filipino workers, which the Senate noted he conceived as early as 1967, and which today generates more than $30 billion annually for the Philippines. Long before “OFW” became a familiar shorthand in every household, JDV already treated migrant workers’ sacrifices as a national lifeline that deserved an institutional channel, not just sentimental applause. In the same long list are laws that helped rewire how the country invests and grows: the Build-Operate-Transfer framework, bases conversion, economic zones, and the New Central Bank Act—policies that reshaped infrastructure building, redirected former military lands toward development, and strengthened monetary institutions. The point is not to argue that every law was flawless; no era produces perfect policy. The point is that he aimed his political capital at the architecture of the state, not merely the theater of politics. JDV’s statesmanship also carried a diplomatic texture that many domestic politicians never acquire. The Senate resolution recalled his service as Minister and Economic and Press Counselor in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) during the Vietnam War. It’s the kind of formative assignment that teaches you a quiet truth: conflicts can look “far away” until they suddenly rearrange your own region’s future. That may help explain why he was, by reputation and by repeated effort, a peacemaker—mediating with Muslim secessionists, rightist military officers, and communist insurgents in pursuit of agreements and amnesty programs. He also helped push an Interfaith Dialogue initiative at the United Nations, an attempt to treat politico-religious conflict as something to be managed by conversation before it becomes tragedy. Even after his peak years in the House, he continued to think in regional terms—Asia as a community that needed more venues for conversation and cooperation. The Senate cited his role in founding or chairing organizations such as the International Conference of Asian Political Parties (ICAPP), the Asian Parliamentary Assembly (APA), and the Asian Peace and Reconciliation Council (APRC), among others. And in 2017, he was appointed as Special Envoy for intercultural dialogue, and also served as Special Envoy to APEC. But if you ask those who worked with him what they will miss most, you will hear less about titles and more about temperament: the sense that he could be firm without being petty, ambitious without being small. In the tributes after his death, even political opponents remembered his magnanimity—how he made room for minorities, how he mentored younger lawmakers, how he treated institution-building as an ethical obligation, not a procedural nuisance. This, perhaps, is the most important lesson of Speaker Joe De Venecia: Statesmanship is not a costume you wear on ceremonial days. It is the daily, unglamorous habit of choosing dialogue over division, policy over posturing, and country over clique—especially when doing so is inconvenient. In our time, when politics often rewards the sharpest sound bite and the fastest outrage, remembering JDV as a respectable figure is not about nostalgia. It is a challenge. It asks today’s leaders: Can you still build a “rainbow” in a nation that profits from permanent thunderclouds? This opinion column is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share, adapt, and redistribute this content, provided appropriate credit is given to the author and original source.

Originally published in Manila Bulletin There’s a particular relief that arrives the moment you open a notebook. Not the productivity kind—the “look at me, I’m organized” kind—but the quieter relief of doing something the human way: paper, ink, and the privacy of your own pace. It’s a breath of fresh air in a world that wants every thought formatted, uploaded, synced, searchable, and—if we’re honest—slightly performative. That’s why it feels so different from how I spend most of my days. Most days, I live inside a computer—coding, tracing bugs, pulling apart edge cases, and dealing with the layered complexities of AI infrastructure. It’s systems and dependencies, pipelines and latency, data and reliability. Even when you’re “off,” your brain keeps running like a service you forgot to shut down. You start thinking in diagrams. You start translating everything into inputs and outputs. A computer is a wonderful tool. It’s also a noisy room. Even when the screen is “just a blank document,” it isn’t. Behind that blank page are a thousand invisible doors: tabs waiting, notifications hovering, the itch to verify a fact or chase a link. Typing can make you feel efficient, but efficiency isn’t always the friend of thinking. Sometimes it’s the enemy—polishing the surface while the real idea is still trying to show itself. A notebook doesn’t do that. A notebook stays put. Writing by hand is slower, and that slowness is the point. It’s a filter. When your hand has to carry the sentence, your mind listens differently. The page doesn’t refresh. It doesn’t suggest. It doesn’t autocomplete you into a version of yourself that sounds like everybody else. And then there’s the small surprise: I remember more when I write it down. Not “remember” as in “I can find it later with command-F.” I mean remember as in it lodges somewhere. Handwriting presses a thought into the mind the way a seal presses wax—imperfect, textured, unmistakably yours. I can type a meeting note and forget it by lunch. But if I write the same line in a notebook, my brain keeps it. That’s why my suit never leaves the house without a small notebook in the back pocket. Not a big planner that announces itself like a life overhaul. A small one. Quiet. Dependable. The kind you can pull out without ceremony. Because life doesn’t hand you ideas at your desk with perfect lighting and a full battery. It hands them to you in motion—between meetings, mid-conversation, in the strange dead space of waiting. A sentence you want to keep. A question you didn’t know you had. A small insight that evaporates if you don’t give it a home. And yes, you can capture those things on a phone. But the phone brings the whole world with it. The notebook brings only the page. It asks one question: What did you come here to save? That question is the sharpest contrast with my working life. In code and infrastructure, the goal is to remove friction: automate, streamline, eliminate human slowness. In a notebook, the friction is the feature. You can’t “refactor” a page the way you refactor a service. You can cross things out, sure, but the history remains—and that history is clarifying. It shows you what you thought before you corrected yourself. On a computer, everything feels temporary. You can delete, cut, paste, revise endlessly. That’s useful for drafting, but it can also train you to treat your own mind like a document you’re constantly optimizing for approval. On paper, you’re allowed to be unfinished. You’re allowed to write badly. You’re allowed to contradict yourself and leave both versions there. A notebook is forgiving in a way screens rarely are. It doesn’t judge your typos. It doesn’t underline your uncertainty in red. It doesn’t tempt you into making the sentence pretty before it’s true. Sometimes, the freshest air comes from that: truth before polish. So yes—give me the laptop when it’s time to build, ship, and wrestle with the puzzle-box of AI systems. But give me the notebook when it’s time to think like a person again. When it’s time to notice what I’m actually noticing. The small notebook in the back pocket isn’t a quirky accessory. It’s a tiny declaration of independence: My mind is allowed to be private for a while, and ideas can arrive without being immediately turned into tickets, tasks, or implementation details. And in a world that never stops computing, there’s nothing quite as refreshing as opening a notebook and hearing your own handwriting say: here—slow down. Remember. This opinion column is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share, adapt, and redistribute this content, provided appropriate credit is given to the author and original source.

Originally published in Manila Bulletin Fear of failure didn’t announce itself as fear. It called itself discipline. Ambition. “Wanting it badly enough.” It looked responsible from the outside. I was the person who stayed late, double-checked everything, said yes before I had time to think. What I didn’t understand then was that I wasn’t chasing success—I was running from the humiliation of falling short. Failure, to me, was never abstract. It had a face. It sounded like people saying, I knew it. It felt like being exposed as someone who had overreached. I didn’t fear mistakes as much as I feared the moment afterward, when the room goes quiet and everyone decides who you really are. Fear taught me that one misstep could cancel out years of effort. That belief changed how I moved through my life. I started choosing the safer version of myself. The project I knew I could complete instead of the one that excited me. The opinion that wouldn’t rock the table. The goal that looked impressive but didn’t risk public disappointment. Fear made me strategic, but also small. It taught me to measure my worth by outcomes, not effort, and to treat rest like laziness I hadn’t earned yet. The irony is that I was often successful—and still terrified. Fear of failure doesn’t leave when you succeed; it raises the stakes. Now there’s more to lose. Now people expect something from you. Every win becomes a narrow ledge you’re afraid to fall from. I learned how to smile while thinking, This can all disappear. But the hardest part wasn’t failing. It was trying to explain how afraid I was—and not being believed. When I said I was struggling, people pointed to my résumé. When I said I felt stuck, they said I was lucky. When I said I was scared, they told me to be confident, as if confidence were a switch I was refusing to flip. Disbelief followed a pattern: if you look capable, your fear must be imaginary. If you’re functioning, you must be fine. There is something uniquely destabilizing about being told your fear isn’t real while you are living inside it. You start to wonder if you’re weak for feeling it. You start hiding it better. You stop asking for help and start performing competence. Fear of failure thrives in that silence. It grows when it’s invisible. Eventually, fear taught me another lesson: I was spending my life trying to be believed by people who only respected outcomes. People who praised me when I succeeded and disappeared when I struggled. People who confused my fear with ingratitude and my honesty with excuse-making. I kept explaining myself, thinking clarity would earn me understanding. It didn’t. So this column is a line I’m drawing. I no longer believe in the voices that only trust me when I win. I don’t believe in the advice that tells me fear is a flaw instead of information. I don’t believe in shrinking my goals just to avoid the look on someone’s face when things don’t work out. Fear of failure has changed my life. It has cost me risks I didn’t take, words I swallowed, versions of myself I postponed. But it has also taught me something essential: belief starts inward. If I outsource my self-trust to people who only believe in success, I will always be at their mercy. I am learning to fail in smaller, braver ways. To try without rehearsing my apology. To let disappointment be survivable instead of catastrophic. And when someone doesn’t believe me—when they dismiss the fear, minimize the cost—I remind myself: their disbelief is not evidence. It’s just a limit. I believe myself now. And that, finally, feels like progress. This opinion column is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share, adapt, and redistribute this content, provided appropriate credit is given to the author and original source.

Originally published in Manila Bulletin In the Philippines, dignity is treated like a personality trait. If you can endure the commute—squeeze into a jeep, climb footbridges, dodge broken sidewalks, and thread through traffic—you are called “madiskarte.” We celebrate resilience because we have to. But dignity should not be earned through hardship. In a well-designed place, it is built into the ordinary: curbs without sudden drops, crossings that give you time to walk, buses you can board without a risky climb. It is there when a grandmother can travel alone without asking for help, and when children can be outdoors without adults treating the street like a threat. “Dignity by design” means infrastructure that does not humiliate people as the price of getting through the day. It does not reserve independence for the young and able-bodied. It is planned around those with the least margin for risk—because when you build for the most marginalized, the whole system becomes safer and easier for everyone. The Philippines already has laws that point in this direction. The Accessibility Law (Batas Pambansa Bldg. 344) requires access features in buildings and public utilities. The Magna Carta for Persons with Disability (Republic Act 7277) frames disability rights as equal rights and calls for integration into everyday life. Yet in many places these principles become theater: ramps blocked by obstacles; sidewalks taken by parking; footbridges replacing safe crossings; and elevators missing, broken, or ignored. This gap between law and lived reality is not only an accessibility failure. It is a national efficiency problem. A transport system that works only for the fittest wastes human potential every day. Picture the standard we should aim for: an elderly woman using public transport by herself. For that to be possible, the entire trip must work end to end—continuous sidewalks; shaded stops; vehicles that allow level or low-step boarding; clear audio and readable signage; transfers that don’t require long, exposed walks across hostile intersections. Build that, and you have not built a “special” system. You have built one that also works for parents, injured workers, pregnant commuters, and anyone carrying a load. You create a network people can choose, not one they endure because they cannot afford an alternative. The payoff is not abstract. Congestion is often treated as destiny, but it is a design outcome and it comes with a bill. JICA has cited estimates from a 2017 survey placing Metro Manila’s transport costs from traffic congestion at around ₱3.5 billion per day, with projections rising sharply by 2035 without intervention. When public transport is reliable and walking to it is safe, fewer households feel forced to buy private vehicles just to survive daily life. That reduces pressure on roads and gives time back to families and businesses. Dignity by design also changes what streets are for. Too often, streets are treated as corridors for cars, while everyone else is pushed to the edges. A city is not made modern by flyovers alone; it is made modern when children can be outside without gambling with traffic. If a child can play safely, it signals managed speeds, predictable crossings, and sidewalks wide enough for people to walk side by side. This is not sentimental; it is life and death. The Philippine Road Safety Action Plan 2023–2028 sets an ambition to reduce road traffic deaths by 35 percent by 2028, recognizing road trauma as a public health and development issue, not merely a matter of driver discipline. People behave the way streets instruct them to behave, and streets that forgive mistakes save lives. There is another benefit that rarely makes it into project proposals: social trust. When streets are safe and pleasant, neighbors see each other, small businesses benefit from steady foot traffic, and older people remain present in public life. So why does dignity still feel rare? Partly because we have normalized inconvenience and lowered expectations until we celebrate scraps. Partly because projects are measured by what can be inaugurated, not what can be used. A station that looks impressive but is reached by a broken, dangerous route is a monument, not mobility. A footbridge built instead of calming traffic is a confession that we were unwilling to slow cars down. Dignity by design requires a different definition of success: whether infrastructure works for the person with the least power in the system. Can the slow walker cross safely? Can the wheelchair user complete the route without being forced into traffic? Can the grandmother ride without fear? Can a child go outside without adults rehearsing worst-case scenarios? These are not luxury questions. They are basic questions for a country trying to grow without leaving people behind. If we can design for dignity, we will not only move faster. We will live better. This opinion column is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share, adapt, and redistribute this content, provided appropriate credit is given to the author and original source.