H indsight is the lowest form of wisdom. I can tell you what it was like when your campus was nothing but cogon waste, when all those trees that line your streets were just saplings. I can tell you, why we were left behind by all our neighbors when in the fifties and the sixties we were the richest, most progressive country in the region, when Seoul, Tokyo, were ravaged by war and Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta were mere kampongs, when Bangkok was a sleepy town criss-crossed by canals. I never was in

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... China till 1979, but I know in the forties that that country was always threatened by famine. It had a population then of only half a billion. Now, with more than a billion people, famine is no longer a threat, although hunger still lurks in some of its distant regions. Hunger has always been with some of us, too, but not as much as it is now when so many poor Filipinos eat only once a day. Altanghap, 2 I wonder how many of you know what that word means? So then, why are we poor? Why do our women flee to foreign cities to work as housemaids, as prostitutes? We are poor because we have lost our ethical moorings, this in spite of those massive religious rallies of El Shaddai, those neo-gothic churches of the Iglesia ni Kristo sprouting all over the country, in spite of the nearly 400 years of Catholic evangelization. How can we build an ethical society? We must remember that so-called values are neutral-that so much depends on how people use them. James Fallow's thesis on our "damaged culture" which many of us understand is neither permanent nor inherent. 255