This week, we witnessed an angry Chinese woman who heckled President Hu Jintao as he spoke at the White House. If that incident had occurred in China, that woman would have been shot immediately. In the Philippines, a similar episode happened while Mrs. Arroyo spoke before a graduating class. There also was a heckler who unfurled a banner urging her to resign.

Mrs. Arroyo ended up awarding this young woman her diploma while both looked separate ways.

In my middle age, I am still awed by this exhibition of raw courage. I want so strongly to believe that I have not lost any of the idealism that I once had and given the same circumstances, I would have unfurled an exact banner that would have politely asked the President to step down.

I am reminded of an episode in the Godfather when Sonny Corleone made sure that his brother Michael did not just have his *ic* in his hands and instead had a loaded weapon that had been planted beforehand in the watercloset to shoot Sollozo and the corrupt cop.

I want all these idealistic youth to know that like the Count of Monte Cristo, you need to prepare for this one chance. I would truly hate for this idealistic young woman to be picked-up in the middle of the night and never be heard from again. That had happened many times in our recent past. I remember taking part in my first mass action at the University of the Philippines in 1980 and talking to a fellow skinny youth named Leandro Alejandro who was all raw courage and shining idealism. He was mercilessly assassinated years later. In a sense, it is to the memory of heroes like Leandro that I am making my way home posthaste. Ellie Wiesel said: "What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we shall not be forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled, we shall lend them ours."

Hang in there because I am on my way to provide you cover.

My lawyer-friend stopped me this afternoon and asked when a man was unmistakably getting older. I did not know the answer and he said "when his oldest daughter turned 13".

I remember that day so clearly, shortly after one in the afternoon at the Our Lady of Victory Memorial Hospital in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn when I carried Kathryn in my arms for the first time and I was dancing in the delivery room, part of the perks of being a physician I guess. There have been many sad moments in my life since but I don't think that there has ever been a time when the happiness of that day ever faded enough to make life seem hopelessly sad. My priorities and my perspective permanently changed that day and I continue to live primarily for my four daughters.

Yeats wrote in "Prayer for my Daughter":

"In courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful"

The poem for today is by Richard Jones who totally gets it:

Coming up from the subway
into the cool Manhattan evening,
I feel rough hands on my heart -
women in the market yelling
over rows of tomatoes and peppers,
old men sitting on a stoop playing cards,
cabbies cursing each other with fists
while the music of church bells
sails over the street,
and the father, angry and tired
after working all day,
embracing his little girl,
kissing her,
mi vida, mi corazon,
brushing the hair out of her eyes
so she can see.

What a beautiful day we had today in the Oklahoma panhandle. Warm weather, clear skies and not much wind. The children had a great time hunting for eggs and the two little ones spent almost the entire afternoon playing with a sprinkler contraption. Both girls are now sound asleep.

D-Day is less than 2 months away. My wife and I are so excited. We gave ten years of our lives to Guymon and we intend to give at least ten years back to the Philippines. We hope that with our return, we will be able to prove that it is possible to go back home again with a little downsizing as well as with a serious review/reflection of what truly matters in our lives.

There is an indecent number of " Overseas Filipino Workers" in every part of the world and it may be wishful thinking to hope to get a lot of my countrymen back should the conditions in the Philippines improve sufficiently. But having been an "OFW" these last 17 years convinces me that this is a goal worth fighting for.

Howard Nemerov (1920-1991)
THE SNOW GLOBE

A long time ago, when I was a child,
They left my light on while I went to sleep,
As though they would have wanted me beguiled
By brightness if at all; dark was too deep.

And they left me one toy, a village white
With the fresh snow and silently in glass
Frozen forever. But if you shook it,
The snow would rise up in the rounded space

And from the limits of the universe
Snow itself down again. O world of white,
First home of dreams! Now that I have my dead,
I want so cold an emblem to rehearse
How many of them have gone from the world's light,
As I have gone, too, from my snowy bed.