Lessons and more lessons

Icould tell you about the origins of today’s festivities in honor of St. Valentine’s – that romantic dinner you’ll have with your loved one or paramour; or how much inflation has pushed prices of roses at Dangwa.

Or I could tell you about Juan Ponce Enrile’s big birthday bash tonight. Perhaps it’s to celebrate his 99th year as much as it is to welcome his former chief of staff’s temporary release from jail.

Or I could talk about President Marcos’ trip to Japan and the tycoons who joined him. Or all of the above and more. But it is Feb. 14, whether I like it or not, and it’s that time of the year when I just shut down.

You see, as fate would have it, on this day decades ago and right smack on witching hour, my mother would give birth to me, calling me “the greatest Valentine’s gift ever.”

Oh poor mother, if only she knew what terrible headaches I would give her.

This, obviously, is not a commentary about our dizzying country. So to those who expected otherwise, please accept my apology. Instead, today is the day when I just shut down and shut up, if only to drown out all the noise banging in my head.

Ugly truths You see, there are screams and whispers buzzing in my head sometimes, mostly to remind me of stories and the off-the-record secrets I’ve been told and retold.

There are images too from the past that always crop up – from abandoned babies covered in tattered cartons of Lucky Me to tokhang victims lying in their own pool of blood to children of white slavery.

And there are the hard ugly truths in business and politics.

This is the curse of being a journalist, a curse I never imagined would haunt me when I bravely walked inside a newsroom decades ago as a fresh grad looking for a job.

I handed over my CV to a gruff and aging editor but he didn’t even bother reading it. Instead, he gave me a practical test, one I’ll never forget. “Go to Camanava and look for a story on rape.” “A what?!” I protested in silence. But I wanted to be a journalist and I wanted to slay dragons and I wanted to save the world, so off to the God-forsaken Caloocan-Malabon-Navotas-Valenzuela police station I went in search of a rapist. I got my story that day but I got the curse too. Sure, you get a ringside view of history but you also get to see all the s**t in the world.

Saving the world

Through the years since that day in Camanava, I thought I could save the world, one story at a time, but I realized that the world does not need saving. It is people who do, and mostly from themselves. I’ve learned many other things, many more lessons: That there would be many more rape stories; That some people’s desire for money and power is insatiable;

That even during the pandemic, people will steal from the sick and the poor;

That indeed, behind nearly every fortune is a crime or, in the case of the Philippines, almost always, a Marcos Sr. crony;

That there are wolves in sheep’s clothing – some are manipulative tycoons who will try to use you for their own selfish agendas;

Indeed, psychopaths surround us and they can be people in sleek suits and Hermes ties. They are everywhere in this moving, turning and chaotic world.

But the biggest lesson, really, is that they can be everyone and anyone – including you and me. Who was it who said that whoever goes out to kill the ogre ends up being just like the ogre himself?

I find consolation in knowing that life isn’t black and white but one giant gray area. Sometimes, you end up breaking your own rules to navigate this crazy world and yes, maybe you have to be as ruthless as the ogre to slay him once and for all.

You have to come to terms with that and with all that’s happening around you. You have to understand that the system is one where evil exists along with the good and maybe, just maybe, like Clarice in Silence of the Lambs, the lambs will someday stop screaming and one will find a sort of peace.

Strangely, it was the now late Bobby “RVO” Ongpin who profoundly understood the noise in my head, perhaps because he has seen more ugly truths than I would ever see.

He took pity on me, the tough tycoon that he is, and gave me an open invitation to his fabled Balesin, promising me that being in paradise would make me forget them all.

Death Thinking about RVO days since he died, I realized too that there’s really no telling who will die next.

Ironically, I have written draft obits for people I cover just so I don’t miss any important detail (hey, it’s part of my job) but none of them have passed. And I had none for those who have actually died, RVO included, because I never expected them to leave so soon.

Speaking of death, since the pandemic, I’ve lost family and friends, not once, not twice but many times over.

And that’s a big lesson too that I’ve learned – that you could leave and die in a blink of an eye.

You can only hope that when the hour of death arrives, you’ve done what you could to make the world better than when you first saw it and hope against hope, you haven’t yet turned into those tricksters your mother warned you about.

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