Dr. John’s Wishful is a blog where stories, struggles, and hopes for a better nation come alive. It blends personal reflections with social commentary, turning everyday experiences into insights on democracy, unity, and integrity. More than critique, it is a voice of hope—reminding readers that words can inspire change, truth can challenge power, and dreams can guide Filipinos toward a future of justice and nationhood.
There comes a point in one’s public life when neutrality becomes not a sign of indifference, but of courage. I have reached that point. After years of walking through the narrow bridges of Philippine politics, I have learned that true objectivity cannot coexist with permanent political affiliation. Thus, I have chosen to be partyless—not because I reject the essence of organized politics, but because I want to observe it with clarity, conscience, and freedom from loyalty to colors or names.
To be frank, I was once part of the political system I now objectively study. As a municipal councilor, I belonged to a political party. Later, I served as a deputy secretary general of another, driven not by personal ambition but by a vision to promote an ideological advocacy I genuinely believed in. Those experiences were meaningful—they gave me perspective, patience, and pain. But they also opened my eyes to the shifting winds of our political climate. The truth is, Philippine politics changes like our weather—formed by the heat of interest, moved by the monsoon of influence, and disturbed by low-pressure areas of self-serving ambition. What is true today can be false tomorrow; what is loyal today may turn its back in the next cycle of power.
That is why I chose independence. Affiliation at this point offers me no personal gain. I am not a politician seeking public office, nor am I applying for a government position. My interest is not power—it is understanding. I leave partisan battles to those who live and breathe the campaign trail. I am merely a citizen—an observer, a critic, a thinker—guided not by allegiance but by conscience.
However, independence does not mean isolation. It doesn’t mean I will never affiliate again. When a political party stands on principle—when it shows moral strength, national vision, and genuine service to the people—then I will not hesitate to lend my voice, perhaps even my name. Because in the political arena, especially during elections, neutrality can only go so far. In moments that define a nation’s destiny, silence becomes a form of choice.
Even in mature democracies like the United States, citizens eventually align with values represented by either the Republicans or the Democrats. It is not about blind partisanship—it is about belief. Similarly, in our country, if one is not for democracy, then one is against it. In times when truth, justice, and integrity are at stake, neutrality loses its meaning. One must take a side—not for a person, but for a principle.
As a Filipino who deeply loves my motherland, I believe that vigilance is our greatest duty. We must stay conscious of what is happening around us, for the future of our brothers, sisters, and children depends on the decisions we make today. The nation’s fate is not solely in the hands of politicians; it rests in the moral awareness of its people.
We live in an era where propaganda drowns reason, and loyalty is mistaken for silence. But loving the Philippines means speaking when others choose not to. It means questioning when blind obedience is demanded. It means believing that patriotism is not about who shouts the loudest, but who stands the firmest for truth.
So I remain independent—but not indifferent. Objective—but never detached. For I am, above all, a Filipino whose love for country is larger than any party, deeper than any ideology, and stronger than any tide of political monsoon that comes our way.
There are nights when I dream of a country that wakes up clean—not only its streets, but its conscience. I see children running across fields that were once flooded by money stolen under the guise of public works, mothers who no longer count the cost of school supplies against rice for the week, and barangays that repair bridges because there is money left for building, not for stealing. Then I wake up, and the dream is heavy with the smell of damp paper contracts and the distant laughter of men who have learned how to live like kings on a pauper’s loot. That laughter is the sound of kleptocracy; it is the sound I cannot bear.
We talk about restructuring, about decentralizing, about creating new agencies or abolishing those who have failed. We debate names and organizational charts as if rot in the beams can be fixed by moving the furniture. But I have learned that a name change does not baptize a sinner. You can carve up the institution into a hundred smaller offices, and the greed will flow into them like oil into different jars. The landscape will look different, but the stain will remain. The real question is not who holds the shovel; it is who has learned to sell the soil.
Corruption in our nation is intimate and ordinary. It is the small, almost respectful bribe for a permit; the grand, audacious diversion of billions for a project that exists only on paper; the casual wink that protects a contractor who names no real suppliers. It is a grammar we have all been taught—the polite way to ask for a favor, the quiet assurance that laws are negotiable if you have the right friends and the right notes inside an envelope. This grammar has become a language of survival for some, a system of privileges for others, and a slow death for the rest of us.
I do not write my words in rage alone. I write it in sorrow for my countrymen who wake up each morning to the same injustices that drown their opportunities. I write it because I have seen how a thief graduates from taking petty sums to orchestrating empires of theft. Greed, once tasted, becomes a hunger that eats the very anchors of decency. It buys influence, it recruits silence, and it fashions rules that bend like reeds in a storm. And when the storm comes—the floods, the collapsed bridges, the schools that cannot open—the people who suffer were never the architects of that greed. They were its casualties.
What would it mean, then, to “create fear in the hearts of the corrupt”? To some, the phrase will sound cruel, vengeful, and even impossible. To me, it should be read as a plea for the restoration of moral consequence. Fear of the law, of public disgrace, of the certainty that a life built on stolen funds will unravel—that is what can deter those who measure every act only by its gain. Not fear for fear’s sake, but fear grounded in justice: swift, impartial, and unavoidable.
Imagine if a few of the great looters were made to answer in a court that does not bow. Imagine the headlines not as predictable reruns but as sudden shocks: names once untouchable reduced to testimonies, opinions reversed, luxury seized and returned to the people. Imagine children learning in classrooms rebuilt with recovered funds and mothers who can buy medicine without debt. That fear would be the seed of a new habit—not a habit of hiding, but a habit of honesty. When the powerful see consequences that are not negotiable, their spreadsheets of greed shrink. Their networks falter. The culture that tolerates petty exemptions and grand heists would learn to flinch.
This message is not a call to cruelty. It is a call to justice with courage. We demand the toughening of public protection systems until thieves have no safe harbor left. Strengthen oversight, yes, but more than that: make accountability unavoidable. Invest in forensic audit teams that relentlessly pursue financial gains. Make prosecution predictable and convictions timely. Remove the protective cloth of political patronage that so often drapes the guilty. And let the moral language change: let honesty be praised not as an exception but as the standard, and let corruption be named for what it always is—theft, betrayal, and violence against the common good.
Kleptocracy is cunning; it prefers to be polite. It frames theft as efficiency, bribery as facilitation, and looting as entrepreneurship. We must refuse those euphemisms. We must become loud and clamorous about what was taken and by whom, not to satisfy vengeance but to restore what was stolen from a thousand nameless lives. That restoration is not merely financial; it is moral repair. It is the slow work of restoring trust, of teaching the next generation that public service is not a stepping stone to private fortune but a sacred duty.
When people ask if I want blood for justice, I say no. What I want is consequence. I want the corrupt to feel the chill of accountability so that they will choose a different path. I want a system that makes stealing riskier than serving. If fear means a future in which children’s laughter is the loudest sound after a storm, then let that fear be the instrument of our rebirth.
I write this because I love a country that deserves better than quiet theft. I write because I have seen too many lives ruined by the polite crimes of men who thought they were above consequence. The end of kleptocracy will not come with new names on organizational charts. It will come from the day when corruption is met with inevitability—when justice is no longer optional and honesty is no longer rare. Create fear in the hearts of the corrupt, no more, no less. That is how we begin to mend a flooded nation.
I once read a story about ants. If you place a hundred red ants and a hundred black ants inside a jar, nothing happens. They crawl around, each minding their own space. But if you shake the jar hard and set it down, the ants suddenly turn on each other. The red ants see the black ants as enemies. The black ants see the red ants as enemies. They bite, claw, and kill one another, forgetting that they were never enemies to begin with. The true enemy was never the ants. The true enemy was the hand that shook the jar.
When I reflected on this simple tale, I realized how true it is for us Filipinos. Look at what is happening now. Families, friends, and even communities are divided, not by hunger, not by natural disasters, not even by foreign invaders, but by politics—by whether one supports the Marcos administration or remains loyal to former President Duterte. Every day online I see people hurling accusations at each other. Duterte supporters calling Marcos supporters blind. Marcos's supporters are branding Duterte loyalists as ungrateful. People ending friendships, neighbors turning cold, and families refusing to talk to each other—all because of politics.
But just like the ants in the jar, have we stopped to ask: who is shaking us?
The truth is that ordinary Filipinos—whether you wear red or green, whether you shout “Marcos pa rin” or “Duterte pa rin”—carry the same struggles. We line up in the same grocery stores, our pockets hurting from high prices. We worry about the same floods, knowing that ghost projects and substandard flood control leave us defenseless. We sit in the same traffic, wait for the same promises of better governance, and struggle with the same weight of corruption that bleeds our nation dry. Hunger, poverty, and injustice do not ask for your political colors. They hit us all the same.
And yet, we fight each other. We aim our anger at the wrong people—at neighbors, co-workers, friends—who are just like us, trying to survive. Meanwhile, those who truly benefit from our division quietly laugh. The ones shaking the jar are not the Marcos supporters nor the Duterte supporters, but the opportunists who want us distracted. They are the corrupt officials, the dynasties who never let go of power, the businessmen who bribe their way to contracts and deliver ghost projects. They are the political manipulators who profit from fake news, lies, and online hate.
But there are others too. There are political parties biding their time, waiting for Marcos and Duterte supporters to destroy each other so they can return to power. There are enemies of the state like the CPP–NPA–NDF who thrive when society is in chaos. There are foreign forces shaking our jar: China, which eyes our seas; and Uncle Sam, who would love to see us divided so it becomes easier to plant more bases in our land. Even criminal syndicates, drug lords, and POGO operators have a stake in keeping us weak and distracted. And yes, let us not forget the oligarchs—those who for decades monopolized industries and now wear the mask of “kakampink reformers.” These are the same families that captured the economy after 1986. Instead of the state controlling them, they now control the state.
And why are they so powerful? The reason for their power lies in the weakness of our government. The truth is painful: our Constitution, drafted in 1986, tied the hands of the state. It was built in the name of protecting democracy, but in reality, it empowered the oligarchs and entrenched dynasties to hold us hostage. That’s why the state cannot stop outside forces from shaking our jar. Maybe the time has come to admit the truth: this Constitution has failed to protect the people. It must be changed or amended if we are to free ourselves from those who shake us for their own benefit.
Sometimes, I even ask myself: what if there is truly no hope for us to unite at the national level? What if the divide between political colors is too deep, too poisoned by years of hate? Then maybe, the answer lies closer to home. Maybe the provinces can lead the way. If we cannot unite as a nation, then perhaps governors and local leaders can begin by uniting their own provinces—not in partisan politics, but in development. I have seen what Governor Reynaldo Tamayo has done in South Cotabato, how he has focused on education, welfare, and effective governance rather than wasting energy on national divisiveness. I know there are other exemplary governors out there quietly doing the same, like Governor Roel Pacquiao of Saranggani, Governor Dong Padilla of Camarines Norte, Governor Bonz Dolor of Mindoro Oriental, and Governor Pam Baricuatro of Cebu, who showed great dedication and leadership during the recent earthquake. Why not more of them?
A province with enough economic development can solve what national politics has failed to solve. A province that uplifts its farmers, educates its youth, and creates real opportunities can stop communist insurgency without firing a bullet, and it can calm separatist unrest by proving that government can be just and fair. Why must we always wait for Manila to move when our provinces can act now? Why can’t governors stand up, work with their constituents, and prove that unity can begin at the provincial level? Perhaps the answer to the shaking of the jar is simple: let the provinces get out of the jar, so no one can shake them anymore.
I hesitated to write this reflection. I have friends on both sides—Marcos loyalists and Duterte diehards. I don’t want to lose friendships. I don’t want to be seen as taking sides. But silence also has consequences. If we do not speak of the hand shaking the jar, we will go on tearing each other apart, blind to the real enemy.
Our society must learn a painful lesson: the person in front of you is not your enemy. The jeepney driver who supports Duterte is not the one who keeps you poor. The farmer who admires Marcos is not the reason why your child’s classroom is falling apart. The real enemies are corruption, injustice, and impunity. The real enemies are those who keep shaking the jar while we remain too distracted to notice.
We need to look beyond personalities and political colors. We need real reforms that go deeper—reforms that finally break dynasties, reforms that truly hold leaders accountable, and reforms that give the state the strength to protect the people, not the oligarchs. We need a new system that cannot be hijacked by the same families who have ruled our lives for decades.
More than anything, we need healing. Because as long as Marcos supporters and Duterte supporters see each other as mortal enemies, the true jar-shakers win. And when they win, the Filipino people lose.
I return to the story of the ants. Inside the jar, they forget that they were never enemies. They forget that they only started killing each other because someone shook them violently. What a tragedy it would be if that became the story of our people—that we allowed ourselves to be divided forever, blind to the hands that shake us.
But tragedy does not have to be our destiny. We can stop. We can choose to turn our anger away from each other and focus it where it belongs. We can ask the harder questions: Who really benefits when we are divided? Who profits from our hate? Who is shaking our jar?
And if the national government cannot give us the unity we need, then let the provinces rise. Let the governors take the lead in building real progress where it matters. Let every province create its own strength so that its people no longer live in fear of poverty, insurgency, or neglect. Let us learn to build unity from the ground up, one province at a time.
If we can acquire the courage to do this, then maybe one day we will finally see each other not as enemies but as fellow Filipinos—brothers and sisters trapped in the same jar for too long but now ready to climb out together, free at last from the hands that shake us.
The time has come to stop tearing each other apart. The time has come to look up, to recognize the hand shaking our society, and to finally say, “Enough.”
There was a time when a smile meant sincerity, when a voice on the other end of a line carried the warmth of truth, and when a video call was the highest assurance that the person we were speaking with was real. But that world is fading fast, quietly erased by the quiet genius—and quiet evil—of technology.
Recently, a young Filipino businessman working in Dubai met a woman named Kitchy on WhatsApp. She was graceful, eloquent, and kind. She said she was a restaurant owner and a financial consultant with roots in the Philippines, based in Singapore. She spoke in soft Tagalog, blending familiarity with formality, and he found her presence comforting. They began chatting every day, and as days turned into weeks, her face became the first thing he looked for in the morning and the last voice he heard before he slept.
One night, she invited him to a video call. He hesitated, but curiosity triumphed over caution. When her face appeared, he felt something shift inside him. She looked alive—every blink, every smile, every subtle movement felt human. She tilted her head when she laughed and pursed her lips when she was thinking. The light reflected naturally on her face. It was not a video recording; it was real-time interaction.
And yet, it was not real.
He did not know that he was speaking not to a woman, but to a simulation—an image of an influencer stolen from social media, animated through deepfake technology, and controlled by a syndicate operating outside the country. Every word she said was pre-scripted. Every gesture was preprogrammed. Every emotion was artificial, yet it reached him as if it were real.
He trusted her. He believed in her. He fell in love with her. When she told him about a “special trading platform” where she invested her savings, he wanted to prove his faith in her. She said, “Let us build our dreams together.” It was a line meant to pierce both his heart and his judgment.
And like many before him, he fell.
He sent her his savings. Forty thousand dollars—all gone in a moment. When the platform disappeared, so did she. Her WhatsApp profile vanished; her number could no longer be reached. What he thought was love turned out to be a crime.
The woman he saw, the voice he heard, the affection he felt—none of them existed. They were generated, rehearsed, and executed with precision by a team of cybercriminals using artificial intelligence to manipulate his reality.
When he reported it to the authorities, the investigation revealed a horrifying truth: the syndicate had victimized hundreds across Asia. They used WhatsApp video chats as their new theater of fraud, replacing stolen pictures with living illusions.
He was left not only penniless but also hollow. He told the investigators, “I saw her cry, I saw her blink. How could it not be real?”
That sentence stays with me every time I discuss this subject in my lectures. Because it captures the tragedy of our generation—what if even the things we see are no longer true?
I have watched deception evolve from the crude scams of old to a sleek, clinical industry that designs intimacy as a product. The criminals of today are not lone wolves; they are organized networks—project-managed, resourced, and shielded by layers of anonymity. They franchise deception the way corporations franchise brands. And because their tools are digital, their territory is global.
This is why government must act. What today moves money in illicit pipelines can, if left unchecked, mutate into something far more dangerous. Organized criminal groups that perfect techniques for manipulating populations—stealing savings, undermining trust, sowing fear—are precisely the kinds of networks that can be repurposed or allied with actors who seek to destabilize institutions. If the architecture of crime becomes sophisticated enough, the question is not whether they will remain petty thieves online but whether their reach and methods could be adapted to attacks on civic stability—propaganda campaigns that delegitimize leaders, coordinated disinformation that fractures trust in public institutions, or financially empowered groups that fund subversive activities. The possibility is not alarmist; it is a sober reminder that power accrues where oversight is weak and profit flows unchecked. Prevention, therefore, is not merely about protecting citizens’ wallets—it is about protecting the integrity of our democratic life.
We must imagine law enforcement that patrols networks as vigilantly as officers patrol streets. We must fund cyber-intelligence, digital forensics, and cross-border cooperation because the enemy now moves in terabytes and tokens, not necessarily in boots and cars. We must build teams that can trace the money, the servers, the VPNs, and the code that weave these deceptions together. We must create a system in which a deepfake used to extort a heart is followed quickly by international legal pressure, coordinated takedown, and prosecution.
But even as we invest in hardware and skill, we must not neglect the human side. Technology alone cannot undo the loneliness that makes the trap so effective. We must teach discernment, not to make people suspicious of one another, but to give them tools to verify kindness. We must create cultural practices—simple rituals of verification, code words, and trusted intermediaries—so that affection shared online can be tested without killing every possibility of connection.
This is not a call for paranoia. It is a call for prudence, for structures that let trust flourish safely. The same networks that spread lies can, with better law, better training, and better budgets, be dismantled.
In my classrooms I ask my students to remember one simple thing: technology can simulate gesture, but it cannot simulate conscience. It can copy a laugh, but it cannot replicate guilt. We must build our defenses as much in the heart as in the cloud.
Every era has its deception. Ours just learns to smile. Not everything that smiles at you on WhatsApp has a soul. Some are merely reflections of greed, crafted by those who learned how to make lies look like love.
References
Arya AI. (2025, January 15). Top deepfake incidents of 2024: The rise of AI impersonation. Arya AI Research Blog. https://arya.ai/blog/top-deepfake-incidents
Badshah, N. (2024, March 21). Thousands of celebrities were found to be victims of deepfake pornography.The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/21/celebrities-victims-of-deepfake-pornography
Honigman, J. (2023, July 25). The legal issues surrounding deepfakes.Honigman Law Review. https://www.honigman.com/the-matrix/the-legal-issues-surrounding-deepfakes
Martin, A. (2024, May 7). What are the legal issues surrounding deepfakes?Martindale-Avvo Blog. https://www.martindale-avvo.com/blog/what-are-the-legal-issues-surrounding-deep-fakes
Reuters. (2024, February 1). Manipulating reality: The intersection of deepfakes and law.Reuters Legal Commentary. https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/manipulating-reality-intersection-deepfakes-law
