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.

Just as some golf clubs are known for their "forgiveness", we Filipinos have to be one of the most forgiving people anywhere. It takes a lot of heat to make us reach our boiling point. This is definitely not a bad national quality, it only allows us to be abused rather easily. Case in point is the rally that was scheduled to take place today. Half a million people were expected to join and about 20 thousand showed. Granted that our hardworking congressmen completely turned around from their far from subtle efforts to perpetuate themselves in power, I still expected a little more output from the perennially oppressed.

Now even the president has joined the church's call for "character change" in lieu of charter change. These politicians need to realize that they have become part of the problem. I guess it does take a certain amount of grace however, to be able to pause and think and view one's condition from a different perspective. All the more difficult if you've been immersed in politics all your life.

I am very proud of the Catholic Church. It is spearheading efforts to make government employees and elected officials to become conscious of their responsibilities towards the people that they should be serving. The Church had been complicit in allowing so many abuses to go unpunished in the past. We would never have been subjugated by martial law if we had a more active and responsible Church. I am glad that the Church was able to learn a lesson from all those many years of injustice.

The local Catholic Church has committed itself to a three-fold program of pastoral action including character building that seeks to form persons of faith and virtue through the ministry of the Word and the Sacraments, Catholic education, through programs of formation and spirituality. "To build the future, we need to deepen our sense of honesty and integrity, service and responsibility, stewardship and solidarity".

The Church is committed to building capacity. Poverty being not only about "not having" but also of "not being able". The Church plans to accomplish this through its various training programs, schools, charitable agencies, religious and lay organizations.

The Church is committed to building community by undoing the ruinous divisiveness in the country that is rooted in a culture "too focused on the good of small social groups". Through formation and education, the Church seeks to "promote at every level of society and Church a spirituality of citizenship, which is a concrete way of living out in our country the fundamental social virtue: solidarity. This spirituality of citizenship fosters a sense of patriotism and of being responsible for our country. It develops Filipinos into becoming active and constructive participants in social and political life. It enables the laity to take their rightful leadership role in the social transformation of the country".

We will see what happens tomorrow.