By Herman M. Lagon There are political questions that skim the surface, and there are those that land heavily because they mirror what many of us have long felt. After a coffee break with former co-teachers, a fellow educator quietly asked why the party-list system now feels like a reunion of familiar surnames rather than …
Impulses
How P500 became a punchline
By Herman M. Lagon There is something oddly familiar about the uproar over the proposed P500 Noche Buena budget. Not the warm kind of familiar — like your mother’s handwritten spaghetti recipe or the way your father slices ham too thick. It’s the other kind. The kind you feel when an official says something so …
The Xavier within us
By Herman M. Lagon Every December 3, the world remembers a man who died on a small island off the coast of China — alone, sick and still yearning to serve. St. Francis Xavier never made it to the Chinese mainland. But his story did. More than 470 years later, his restless fire still speaks …
The vape trap reality
By Herman M. Lagon He was not asking for pity. Just 10 days before he died, former air force man Mohd Radzi recorded a six-minute video from his hospital bed, tubes everywhere, a clear bag collecting pus from his lungs. His message was painfully simple: “To the young generation, stop vaping. There’s still time and …
Violence vs. women ends here
By Herman M. Lagon The first thing I noticed this morning when I walked into ISUFST was not the usual chatter of teachers and staff rushing to their 8:00 a.m. reporting for duty, but the bright wash of orange across the hallways. Some wore shirts, others had orange overalls. It wasn’t just orange clothes. It …
Wealth without worth
By Herman M. Lagon There is a moment in every oath-taking ceremony when the room falls into a different kind of quiet — not because the program says so, but because someone says something that lands straight in the gut. At the recent induction of newly minted doctors at SMX, that moment came when the …
Voices rising beyond campus
By Herman M. Lagon The first thing I often notice when I meet young campus journalists is how they hold their notebooks, sketchpads, iPads, or phones. Some press them close like shields. Others clutch them lightly, as if the “pages” can lift them. A few flip them open even before the workshop begins, already searching …
Drop the load
By Herman M. Lagon There are days when you think the biggest surprise will be the capping snacks at the hotel, and then a friend across the secretariat table casually says she might need a TAHBSO — “tabsu,” as she called it. It was said half in jest, half in exhausted honesty, and suddenly all …
When presence is the first kindness
By Herman M. Lagon There is a particular silence that fills a room when people who have carried too much finally sit down to learn how to help others carry their own pain. That was the silence at the PGCA – Iloilo Convention in Iloilo Grand Hotel early this month when Dr. Ana Panganiban, one …
Beyond the numbers
By Herman M. Lagon Numbers help us spot patterns. But they rarely tell the whole story. Behind every percentage point is a real person — someone with struggles, dreams and a story that raw data alone cannot explain. This is where qualitative research comes in. It adds depth to issues that are often reduced to …