Last time I spent the eve of the New Year in the Philippines was in 1988. Now, with my two older daughters, we watched the city become shrouded in the gray fog of gunpowder. You see tonight is our equivalent of the Fourth of July. To scare off the evil and unlucky spirits, we detonate illegal firecrackers way before and way after the stroke of midnight. Millions of dollars worth of pyrotechnics go up in smoke on this night.

Despite all the corruption and pollution and overcrowding and murders and kidnapping we become a hopeful nation during the dying minutes of the year.

Last day of what has been a year of great change. Spent half of the year in the US and the other half in the Philippines. My daughters have adjusted magnificently and they look forward to going to school each day. They have made many new friends and they are slowly learning the language of their parents.

We have spent much time with family members and we continue to rediscover the country we were away from for 17 years. All in all, a great vacation so far.

But what to do now and for the rest of our lives. There are opportunities to get actively involved, to join the political fray, a chance to become an agent for change. This will certainly crimp on our current vacation way of life and will mean less time spent with my daughters. And yet if I do not move now I will only strengthen the forces of inertia.

Nobody should live or die for oneself alone. That would be meaningless. The struggle to do good in a blighted world against very long odds is a noble cause. There is so much work to be done and we must start soon.

Merry Christmas to all of you. I'm still pretty screwed-up from attending my mother's side of Christmas (39 first cousins) and tomorrow, my dad's side with 41 first cousins. I am enjoying my first Christmas in the Philippines in 18 years!

May we all have a prosperous 2007.

There is nothing certain in Philippine politics. The May 2007 elections that had seemed a foregone conclusion last October was once again in jeopardy over the last few weeks. After the giant rally did not materialize, we again do not know if the election will take place. For now though, most everything stops because of the Christmas holiday. These fitful interruptions benefit the well-entrenched (what a surprise) and the uncertainty only heightens the cynicism of those outside the game.

I never imagined that this would be a blitzkrieg campaign. It will be a long, arduous uphill climb. But we need to persevere. Bill Moyers wrote: "We can't change the whole world overnight. There will always be heroes and villains. Let's just have some more heroes. And let's try to be a hero just a little bit more every day of our lives."

Sometime in the 15th century, a law was passed that regulated the dimensions of a man's implement used to beat his wife to a rod or a stick no thicker than the diameter of his thumb, hence the rule.

I use this example to demonstrate how predictable our government moves. Faced with a mammoth demonstration, they quickly backpedaled and totally conceded. One day after the tepid show of force, our president wastes no time in announcing that she was moving right ahead with those irrelevant charter changes once again.

The oldest rule of political scalawags has always been to beat the masses and stay in power for as long as you can get away with it.