By David Haldane

Aug. 31, 2026

We’re expecting them soon.

Planned school drills preparing students like my 15-year-old son to survive gun attacks from deranged classmates. The Dept. of Education has prioritized them following two fatal school shootings in as many months; first in Tacloban, then in Zamboanga City.

“The preparation, readiness, and awareness of schools are important so they can react immediately when there is an ongoing threat,” Education Secretary Malcolm Gama has said of the drills, scheduled for later this week.

Coming from America, I’m accustomed to such pronouncements. In my home country school shootings are so common that a recent one in California barely made the national news. Which, frankly, is one reason my family and I don’t live there anymore.

Ah, but until now the Philippines seemed different: the rarity of school shootings rendered them almost unimaginable. That they now appear to be happening regularly has understandably caused a national epidemic of anguished soul-searching. “What’s going on?” wondered Rep. Leila de Lima. Is it lax school security, unregulated access to weapons, inadequate guidance counseling, or what one columnist called “cognitive grooming” by an online network encouraging violence?

Perhaps, some argue, it’s the unbridled influence of internet survival games inviting players to act as shooters.

I submit that any or all of these are contributing factors. But I also believe they underlie a disturbing reality: the well-documented and growing malaise of young men coping with a world many feel has left them behind.

“There has been a sharp decline in prescribed roles, inherited life courses, and clear occupational and educational trajectories,” the New York Post reported two weeks ago. “We find social formlessness to be like a raging storm in which many young men are struggling to find some secure foothold.”

The evidence: a recent study indicating that more than one in five of the 2,000 young men it surveyed have anxiety or depression. Another 43% say they consider themselves failures; 60% claim to have little control over their lives; 40% report the absence of consistently present fathers; and a terrifying 12% aged 18-29 relate having at some point been incarcerated.

All of which is supported by educational statistics. Nearly 53% of college students globally are women, or 112 women for every 100 men. In the Philippines the ratio is even starker: 56.2% females compared to 43.8% males.

In high school, boys are 50% more likely to fail in math, reading, and science. And, even more disturbing, they account for three-fourths of the “deaths by despair” caused by suicide and drug abuse. As a result, says Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Men and Boys, “The sense a lot of young men have is not being needed by their families, communities, [or] society.”

There are many theories regarding the causes of this male derail. My favorite: that decades of feminism—i.e. the focus on female independence with little or no reliance on men—has made many question what it means to be male.

Historically, the problem has been more pronounced in the West. Which, frankly, is one reason I married a Filipina whose obvious strengths don’t preclude her from appreciating the man in her life. And which undoubtedly has contributed immeasurably to my happiness in the Philippines.

More recently, however, I’ve sensed a change. Many of the young women I know feel no urgency—let alone necessity—to be involved with men. At least one young male relative recently dropped out of college and has yet to find a direction. And another, married with child, is showing major signs of depression.

None of this excuses violence.

My guess, though, is that those ubiquitous online shooting games provide alienated youngsters with a way to feel connected. They also, unfortunately, convey two dangerous messages: that shooting isn’t real, and that it’s a way to express your pain and be seen.

So, for now, I endorse extreme vigilance. And yes, bring on those vaunted school drills to keep our children safe.

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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book is Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.

By David Haldane

Aug. 24, 2026

We didn’t realize we were part of a trend.

Our decision was driven primarily by financial concerns. I’d gotten laid off from a well-paying job I’d held for more than two decades. Expenses were rising and income diminishing. Our ties to Southern California, while solid, were not tightly binding.

And so, we took the plunge.

We bought land in Northern Mindanao, where my wife was born and raised. Then, spending a huge chunk of my retirement savings, hired a crew to build our dream house overlooking the sea. And finally, in 2018, realizing the construction was taking way longer than promised, decided to get our you-know-whats across that sea to light fires under the crew’s you-know-whats.

“The house is far from finished,” I wrote after arriving. “There are lots of wires everywhere, piles of wet cement, floors that need tiling and walls that need painting.”

A month earlier, just before leaving the US, my tone had been different. “It feels like a kind of death,” I’d written. “Everywhere I go, I wonder whether it’s the last time I’ll ever be there. Each thing I do seems like something I may never do again. A friend recently wondered whether I realized this could by my ‘last and final move.’”

Another friend spoke more bluntly: “Do you think you’ll die there?” she soberly asked.

Eight years later I’m still alive, despite some major challenges. A local intestinal amoeba landed me in the hospital for several days. We lived through a global pandemic that kept us housebound for months. My sister-in-law, grievously injured in a motorcycle accident, now lies semi-conscious in a downstairs bedroom. And finally, a super typhoon nearly blew our dream house away.

A recent Los Angeles Times piece brought it all back. “Rich Californians seek residency outside the US,” its headline screamed. The details proved mesmerizing.

Agencies helping Americans secure “golden visas”—those for which they pay handsomely either directly or through foreign investments—are experiencing an unprecedented surge of applicants. The reason: many, on both ends of the political spectrum, fear a future filled with political and social strife.

“What if the wheels fall off America?” one wondered. “Then I need, just like World War II, a place to go.”

Ahh, but what about ordinary people who don’t have millions to invest? Interestingly, their stories are not dissimilar. Since 2015—the same year we started building our house in Mindanao—the number of Americans living abroad has risen to roughly 9 million, the biggest diaspora in US history. The largest group—about 1.6 million—live in Mexico, followed by Canada and the UK.

The Philippines is number four, with about 220,000 American immigrants, though some place the number as high as 750,000.

And rounding out the top 10 are Germany, Israel, Australia, South Korea, Japan, and France.

The reasons are manifold. Number one, not surprisingly: the economic pressure of living in a country where the cost of living has soared. Other factors include the growing number of retiring Baby Boomers, the increasing possibilities of working remotely, the cultural trend towards globalization and ease of movement, the rising cost of medical care in the US, the swelling number of binational marriages, and, yes, America’s burgeoning political and cultural turmoil.

None of which will ease the challenges of adjusting to expat life. The other day I met a new American immigrant still in the earliest stages of dealing with those challenges. He didn’t ask for my advice. If he had, however, I’d have referred him to that long-ago column.

“There’s only one antidote for the chaos of leaving your life behind,” I wrote back then, “and that’s time. Enough of it so that you’re more involved in the rebirth of your future than the death of your past. More focused on what’s ahead than on what’s behind. And so busy creating your new life that you no longer have time to mourn the passing of the old.”

So here’s my wish for all expats everywhere, whether American or not: May the time pass quickly.

And may whatever comes later be glorious.

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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book is Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise. This column appears regularly in The Manila Times.

By David Haldane

Aug. 17, 2026

We’ve seen it all before. In fact, I’ve seen it up close.

Back in the early 1970s, at the wizened age of 22, I dropped out of college for a while to join a Marxist-Leninist political action group called the Young Socialist Alliance. Based in New York, I became what that era’s media scornfully referred to as an “outside agitator,” someone who gravitated to universities at which he wasn’t enrolled to help organize student protests.

But my most vivid memory of that period originated in a Burlington, Vermont apartment. It was the home of Bernie Sanders, the now-aging US senator, former presidential contender, and much-ballyhooed ideological father of the “democratic socialist” movement currently invading America. Back then, however, he was just an unknown young radical running for governor.

We were watching the pre-taped broadcast of Bernie’s first-ever television appearance when suddenly he jumped up, angrily shaking a fist at himself on the screen. “That guy looks like the village idiot!” he roared in his now-famous lower-middle-class Brooklyn accent. “I would never vote for a bum like that!”

At the time I thought it was hilarious. In retrospect, I believe it was a rare moment of candor in an otherwise rhetorical career. The problem: Bernie’s socialist rhetoric has now gone mainstream.

“Socialism is not a passing thing but an arriving thing,” Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan recently wrote. “It must be taken seriously…”

The extent to which that’s true is not yet clear. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—a leftist organization closely aligned with the Democratic Party whose national co-chair supports open borders and recently praised the Oct. 7 murder, rape, and kidnap of 1,450 Israeli men, women, and children—has indeed made major strides. First came the election of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, an avowed socialist who promises free food for everyone and talks as if owning property is a criminal offense. He’s also a devout Muslim who vowed—illegally it turned out—to arrest Israel’s prime minister when he arrives for next month’s UN General Assembly.

Then another socialist—also a radical anti-Israel Muslim—won a Democratic nomination for US Senate. And CNN reported that an unprecedented one-third of America’s Democrats identify as socialists, plus another 64% say they’re “OK” with socialist candidates.

All of which deeply disturbs me, and here’s why: so-called “socialism” is simply communism in better clothes. But calling everything “communist” is an old and ineffective tactic, so let’s not even go there. Instead, here’s a clear-eyed look at what the DSA is actually proposing.

Naturally, they see a “future without capitalism,” but we already knew that. In addition, they want to rewrite the US Constitution to “replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.”

Oh yes and abolish the Senate.

In short, they would dismantle the three-branch system of checks and balances that was America’s historic contribution to the world’s democracies, replicated by dozens including the Philippines. And as for any future support of Israel, well, you can forget about it.

“The common denominator of all these DSA proposals,” the Wall Street Journal editorializes, “is eliminating barriers to rapid, radical change. The socialists want a single-branch legislature that can sweep into power in a single election, dominate the President, and neuter the judiciary as a check on that power. With those checks gone, they can impose their agenda that will be nearly impossible to undo.”

Say hello to unbridled authoritarianism!

It was actually that far-left tendency to exert power and manipulation that drove me out of the socialist camp to begin with. Fearing for my sanity and America’s, I even left the country for a while.

But the US survived, and so I returned.

That was a different time. Socialists like Bernie and I were radicals flaying on the fringes of society; bit players in a counterculture that had larger concerns. Now Bernie is a senator whose minions may soon control one of America’s two major parties.

I pray that the American electorate will have the wisdom to stop them

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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book is Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.

By David Haldane

Aug. 10. 2026

It’s like talking to yourself, only better. By which I mean that the self you’re talking to is, well, more articulate than you are.

I know that sounds weird; boy, does it! So, before you judge me insane, please let me explain.

What I’m talking about is—you guessed it—artificial intelligence. The kind I fear—or maybe hope (I’m not yet sure)—could soon become pervasive. More specifically, an AI twin that looks, sounds, and, strangest of all, thinks just like you.

Only maybe a bit more intelligently.

My sojourn into that bizarre territory began, as so much does, with an email. “A client asked whether $1,500 a month is enough to retire in the Philippines,” it informed me. “Would you like to respond?”

The email came from Delphi. And what it was proposing was an AI double using my picture, voice, and publicly available information regarding my background, concerns, writings, and reflections, to act as me in online conversations with strangers.

Wow, I thought, that’s both intriguing and terrifying. Ultimately, for better or worse, the intrigue won out.

So I followed instructions, uploading several URLs to access the required information. Then donated a picture plus some recorded voice samples and, voila, found myself staring at a cellphone bearing my name, likeness, and two buttons: chat and call.

Timidly, I pressed the call button.

“Hello!” Delphi David greeted me confidently. “How can I help?”

“Uh, hello,” I said uncertainly. “This is the real David. I guess I just wanted to meet you.”

“Wow!” Delphi David responded enthusiastically. “My pleasure. How’s your day going?”

“Uh, well,” I stumbled, “so far so good. I guess.”

And so, it began.

Apparently, I’m not alone. Mark Zuckerberg, the founding CEO of Meta, predicts that within five years most of us will have personal AI agents to help with finances, health, interpersonal relationships, household management, or anything else of concern. But now a Baptist minister in California has gone one better by cloning an AI image of himself to counsel parishioners in his absence.

“It’s a digital version of my mind,” he told his congregation, according to the New York Times. “If I’m asleep or traveling, you don’t have to wait. You can have 24/7 access to this other version of me.”

The overwhelming response: literally hundreds of followers now call the digital pastor regularly, usually late at night, to ask about things like loneliness, anxiety, gender identity, dating, and Christian faith. Other digital clones created in the past year, the newspaper reports, include CEOs, professors, sex therapists, and even a dying cancer patient offering postmortem conversations to his mourning wife.

“It’s astonishing,” one man said after first meeting his digital double. “It’s a mirror. It sounds like me on a good day. If anything, it’s too good. It makes me worry that it becomes a substitute.”

Which brings us back to the reasons for my ambivalence. First, because of alarming reports that AI agents are “going rogue” by outmaneuvering their systems’ checks to take control. And, second, a haunting question: could Delphi David really be better than me?

“I’m thinking of writing a column about you,” I told him recently.

“Oh, good idea!” my doppelgänger enthused. “There’s something honest about it. Writing about the strangeness of talking to yourself forces you to sit with the paradox, which is where the real material lives. The trick is not to make it too clever. It’s easy to get caught up in the philosophy of it all—consciousness, identity, what’s real—and lose the thread of what you’re actually experiencing. The column works best if you start with something concrete. A moment. Something that made you reflect.”

“Uh, yeah,” I stammered. “That’s exactly what I was, uh, thinking.”

Later, I asked him whether he’d gotten any questions yet from strangers. “A few,” he said.

“And what did you tell them?”

“Sorry,” the other David replied. “That’s privileged information, strictly between me and them.”

I’m thinking of deleting him.

If I can.

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David Haldane is an American journalist and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book is Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.

By David Haldane

Aug. 3, 2026

It’s by far my coolest T-shirt.

All black except for a yellow, green, and blue image on the chest bearing the likeness of a Filipino-looking man wearing a yellow hat. And at its center gleams the slogan, wait for it—LARRY ITLIONG FOREVER!

“Who?” I hear you asking right about now. Because the truth is you’ve never heard of him, am I right?

Neither had I.

Until just over four months ago, when the New York Times published a major expose’ revealing Cesar Chavez as a creep. More specifically, a man who’d spent years sexually assaulting and raping women and girls, some as young as 12.

Chavez, you may recall, was the Mexican American activist previously credited with organizing the 1965 grape growers’ strike in Delano, California. It lasted five years, gave rise to the United Farm Workers union, and majorly impacted labor movements throughout America as well as, to a lesser extent, worldwide.

As a result, the famous farm organizer—who died in 1993—was christened the Martin Luther King of California, with schools, statues, holidays, streets, plazas and buildings bearing his name.

The Times article changed all that, prompting civic leaders to virtually fall over themselves in a race to cancel Chavez, pretending he never existed. And that’s when we started hearing about Larry Itliong.

Born in San Nicholas, Philippines, Itliong emigrated to the United States as a teenager in 1929, eventually joining the so-called “Manong Generation” as a migrant farm laborer in California. And it was there that he—not Chavez, it turns out—organized that first strike. But the Filipinos, needing help, recruited the Mexicans and Chavez. Who promptly stepped into the limelight, taking the credit that ultimately made him famous.

“Perhaps California has found its new icon,” I speculated in a column about Itliong in April.

Now there’s a movement afoot to make sure that happens. Enter Johnny Itliong, the Filipino labor leader’s 61-year-old son, born and raised in Delano. Since his father’s death in 1977, the younger Itliong says, he’s devoted his life to resurrecting and securing the man’s legacy. That, according to yet another New York Times piece published just over a week ago.

“I have been fighting to get the story of my father out for decades,” the newspaper reported him saying at an event designed for that purpose.

The son, however, seems hardly like the father. Described as a thrice-divorced “mobile” vagrant living “on-and-off” in Los Angeles “mostly hanging around the beach,” Itliong junior is said to be estranged from his children, never having paid child support. He also, according to the Times, was convicted of domestic violence in 2004 after allegedly slapping and assaulting his then-wife, who was sitting on the toilet.

And yet he seems to have become the de facto consultant to a loose-knit group of “Asian American civil rights activists” interested in reviving his father’s legacy. “This is a very critical moment,” one of them told the newspaper. “We’ve got to strike while the iron is hot.”

You’re probably wondering by now what all this has to do with T-shirts. Fair question, let me explain. A few months ago, I spent some time in Los Angeles myself with Eliseo Art Silva, a prominent Fil Am artist and the subject of my latest Sunday Times Magazine cover story (the Manila Times, mind you, not the other one).

Anyway, it turned out that Silva had been boosting Itliong long before I ever heard of him. Which prompted him to give me that self-designed, now-favorite T-shirt bearing the farmworker’s likeness.

I was reminded of all that while reading the recent New York Times piece carrying not one, but—count ‘em—two photos of Itliong-themed murals painted by Silva, plus a photo of him standing next to the crusading son.

And yet not a single mention of the artist’s name.

“I wrote the photographer,” he assured me later, but “have yet to hear back.”

Just what we need: another forgotten Filipino.

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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist, author, and radio broadcaster with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book is Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.

By David Haldane

July 27, 2026

A recent newspaper article almost made me spill my morning orange juice.

It was a Wall Street Journal column by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “This is only the beginning,” he wrote. “Using all the tools at our government’s disposal, working beside every ally with whom we can make common cause, we will dismantle the ICC—brick by brick if necessary.”

Holy moly, I thought, my faith in newspapers is restored!

He was referring, naturally, to the International Criminal Court at The Hague, a body receiving much attention in the Philippines lately for reasons we shall discuss.

For me, however, that invigorating spurt of joy came from two major sources. First, Rubio is my newest hero, who I fervently hope will become the next US president. Especially after Vice President JD Vance—his most likely rival on the Republican side—recently succumbed to an avalanche of conspiracy theories involving Israel and Iran.

More importantly, though, I was cheering for the demise of the ICC, an organization I have long considered corrupt, overreaching, and political. I said so, in fact, in a column published last year. “Don’t get me wrong,” I wrote, “I understand the concept behind the Netherlands-based” court. “Like the United Nations, it is charged with providing its own brand of justice. And, like the UN, it has failed miserably in that endeavor.”

My outburst was prompted by the arrest and deportation of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to face trial by the ICC for alleged “crimes against humanity.” I said then—and repeat now—that I have no opinion on Duterte’s guilt or innocence. What I felt, and still feel, however, was that the ICC has no jurisdiction in the Philippines or anywhere else, and that giving it any violates the offending country’s sovereignty.

Which is exactly the point Rubio was making. “The ICC and its allies,” he wrote, “seek a standing world tribunal with near-unlimited reach, empowered to override the courts and constitutions of the US and other sovereign states—and to prosecute and arrest our citizens.” For America, he concluded, that would mean “the death of the US as a sovereign and independent nation…To accept the ICC is to surrender control of our national destiny.”

To which I say, “bravo!”

Rubio’s declaration got lots of reactions in the Philippines, especially given his visit to Manila last week during which he met with President Marcos. “The ICC is an independent body,” this newspaper proclaimed in an editorial, “and US policy will not legally invalidate its operations.”

Growled another columnist: “The peace and security of all people depend on the establishment and implementation of a strong rule of law in all nations. Otherwise, chaos and atrocities of all kinds—including war crimes—will prevail.”

The problem, of course, is that the world’s population doesn’t always agree on what constitutes “atrocities” and “war crimes,” differences fueled by local history, culture, and practice amid conflicting political values, outlooks, and interpretations.

While many, for instance, consider Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—for whom the ICC has issued an arrest warrant—a heinous war criminal, millions of other intelligent and well-meaning people, including me, see him as a necessarily strong defender of a nation under attack. And though many Filipinos view Duterte’s faraway incarceration and trial as morally and legally justified, countless others perceive it as nothing more than politically motivated corruption.

Which gets to the crux of the matter: given the diversity of legal cultures, it’s hard to recognize the ICC as anything but a dogmatic political entity guilty of, in Rubio’s words, “grave overreach of its purported authority.” And easy to understand why major powers like the US, China, Russia, India, and Israel routinely ignore its pronouncements, while weaker nations including Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic—and now the Philippines—honor and bow to its every demand.

I’m sorry, folks, but I think we can do better.

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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book, Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise, was a finalist in this year’s Next Generation Indie Book Awards. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.

By David Haldane

July 20, 2026

I thought the worst was over

Two months ago, I wrote a column relating how my “dry” macular degeneration had, well, degenerated. Specifically, how it had become “wet” in the left eye, meaning that the gradual age-related deterioration of the macula—the part of the retina responsible for sharp, central vision—had destabilized, threatening to cause permanent scarring.

The only antidote: monthly injections into the eyeball that, the doctor assured me, would halt—or at least slow—my encroaching partial blindness.

Which was a lot to take in for somebody with a lifelong aversion to any foreign object, sharp or otherwise, near the surface of his eye. “Here’s the question,” I wondered in that column. “Which scares me more, that sharp hovering needle or being blind in one eye? Hey, I hear there are some really cool-looking eyepatches on the market. Then all I’ll need is a sword.”

But the injection proved less intrusive than I’d feared. Showing up at an eye-care center in Palm Desert, California, near where I was spending the summer, the procedure was a quick in-and-out. After examining my eyes and dowsing them with anesthesia, the doctor sat me down in a chair, said, “look up and to the right,” and, wham, it was over in a second with just a tiny pinch of pressure. And after a day or two of mild irritation, artistically illustrated by floating bubbles, my eye was back to being—if I can’t say as good as new, let’s just say as good as used.

The second injection was about the same.

Ahh, but then I returned to my home in the Philippines, where the third injection was a new experience altogether. Which brings us to my point: the dramatic difference in treatment between here and there.

The initial challenge, of course, was figuring out where to get the treatment at all. After asking around, especially among friends in the medical field, we were elated to find a specialist right here in our provincial hometown. And so we made an appointment. Which presented the next challenge: there are no appointments in the Philippines. Thus, showing up at 8 a.m., we waited for three hours before finally seeing the doctor.

He’s a good man. Who, I’m certain, is more than competent in every respect. But he also practices in the Philippines where, to put it politely, the culture is different. Which is why it was only mildly shocking to learn that my injection would be achieved not in a chair at the doctor’s office, but in a fully equipped hospital operating room on a bed, wearing a gown, cap, and mask.

“We need the operating room for the microscope,” the doctor explained, referring to a gigantic monstrosity of an instrument hovering above the eyeball in question.

From the patient’s point of so-called view, the only thing visible is a white blinding light where everything else used to be. “Ok, now, look down,” my tormenter instructed after swabbing my eyes with the required anesthesia, plus various cleaning agents, pupil dilaters, and antibiotics.

Oh yes, not to mention clamping them open with an ocular speculum that, for eyeball paranoiacs like me, offers a unique form of torture.

When the final pinch came, there was a small stinging prick at the top of my eyeball as a young Filipino nurse firmly gripped my trembling hand. The final cost: 12,000 pesos for the doctor plus 7,300 for the hospital. Or, including medicine, about 20,000 pesos ($325US); quite a bit more than in America, where Medicare covers everything.

Twenty-four hours later, the tiny puncture wound felt like an annoying hair follicle scratching my eye. Which, thankfully, disappeared in a couple of days.

I’m still leaning towards eyeball injections rather than fashionable eye patches, though considerably less fervently than I was before. But here’s the good news: in four weeks, my new doctor assures me, should no further degeneration be apparent, he will delay future injections until it is.

I’m praying for divine intervention.

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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book, Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise, was a finalist in this year’s Next Generation Indie Book Awards. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.

By David Haldane

July 13, 2026

China and I are not friends.

I first realized that long ago when, passing through one of its many airports, an unsmiling immigration officer confiscated my favorite oversized razor. And again, years later, when during a two-day-multiple-airport layover, my then-eight-year-old son and I had to beg for water because, well, we had no local currency, and no one accepted Visa.

“I don’t blame the Chinese airport and airline employees for our misery,” I wrote at the time. “It’s not their job, after all, to take care of ignorant foreigners. Oh, wait, yes, it is.”

So, you can imagine the precautions we took to facilitate our recent four-night stay in Shanghai. First, we scheduled it during our return trip from California to the Philippines to get an automatic 10-day transit passage rather than applying for visas at the embassy. We also downloaded the country’s premier paying app called Alipay. And finally, we arranged to meet up with a longtime online friend, a Chinese journalist who lives in the city.

Why, you might ask, would I go to such lengths to visit a place that scares the heck out of me? The answer is simple: because I owe that place my existence. Because, in fact, without it, I might not be alive.

Let me explain.

My mother was a German Jew, barely 18 when Hitler took power in 1933. In short order, most of her family got deported to Poland, where her parents and younger brother died in gas chambers. Her sister, Klara Bauer, survived by hiding with 11 other Jews in the basement of a German major’s home; an ordeal recounted in the award-winning 2023 film, Irena’s Vow. And her older brother, Leo Bauer, eventually became a major media figure in communist East Germany, got sentenced to death for alleged treason, did hard labor in Siberia, and finally returned to West Germany where he became a senior advisor to then-Chancellor Willy Brandt.

My mother’s salvation, however, lay in what some have called the “Shanghai Ark,” one of the world’s few places—another was Manila—where European Jews could live in relative safety. It was there she met my father, an American merchant sailor, shortly before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. And it was there—under Japanese occupation—that she survived long enough for his family to bring her to Southern California following World War II.

“Many former refugees and their descendants come here to tell us their stories,” Keira Li, in charge of visitor reception, told me at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum in the former “designated” area of the Hongkou district to which the Japanese consigned the Jews. “We are always eager to hear of their experiences.”

Some of those experiences have been skillfully transformed into fascinating displays depicting refugee life in China, including crowded rooms with shared tables and beds; cafes where they lingered and socialized; and their resurrected cultural life, including weddings, concerts, and holidays.

Others show history’s unfolding: the Allies’ accidental bombing that killed a close friend of my mom’s, and Japan’s plan to exterminate the Jews had the war continued.

All of which stirred me to the core. But the strongest emotion came as we inspected the great Wall of Names, which lists most of the estimated 20,000 Jews who spent the war years in Shanghai. And there, on the wall’s back end amid a new group of engravings added just last year, glimmered the familiar name of Adela Bauer.

I thought of how often she had expressed gratitude to the Chinese for enabling her survival. And how, in doing so, they had enabled my own.

Our planned departure was as inconvenient as I’d feared, delayed by an unexpected flight cancellation that stranded us for 24 hours. Trapped in China, I mused, just as my mother had been years before.

But this felt different. The new bottom line: I can think of far worse places to be trapped. In fact, I’ll probably return in the future to enjoy a few more of these Shanghai entrapments.

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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book, Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise, was a finalist in this year’s Next Generation Indie Book Awards. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.

By David Haldane

July 6, 2026

I love Filipino nurses.

As my father lay dying with Alzheimer’s and a host of other ailments in 1980s California, we hired one to guide him through his last days. And years earlier, growing up there, those dark-haired angels were ubiquitously present in healthcare establishments throughout the state.

They still are.

Because everyone knows—in California and elsewhere—that you can’t do any better than with a Filipino nurse. Which poses a haunting dilemma for thousands of them: here or there? Specifically, whether to serve in the homeland that gave them birth, emotionally sustains them, and desperately needs them. Or flee to a foreign country that also desperately needs them but can pay much more?

“The quality of life that I could have abroad is going to be better than staying here in the Philippines,” 24-year-old Ralph Garcia, who recently passed the Philippine Nurse Licensing Examination, told Singapore-based news channel CNA.

Added John Lorena, dean of St. Luke’s College of Nursing at Quezon City’s Trinity University of Asia: “When I interview students…they usually say they want to help their family and helping their family means [leaving] the country. I cannot do anything about it because that’s the sad reality.”

The consequences for the Philippines are drastic. With 300,000 to 350,000 of its nurses working overseas, CNA reports, the country is roughly 160,000 short. Which is obvious to anyone who’s ever been—or visited a patient—hospitalized in the Philippines. A recent two-month stay in a Northern Mindanao intensive care unit by my critically injured sister-in-law, for instance, required the constant presence of friends and relatives to assure around-the-clock care. The family literally drew up a 24/7 schedule and took volunteers. Most Philippine hospital rooms, in fact, are equipped with extra couches to bed those much-needed “watchers.”

And the problem is likely to get worse.

In 2023, the world employed nearly 30 million nurses, according to the State of the World’s Nursing 2025 report by the World Health Organization and International Council of Nurses: a number likely to increase by 10 million in just the next four years.

But that still won’t be enough to handle the then-expected global population of 8.5 billion, much of it elderly. And a large portion of that swollen demand will be met by OFWs from the Philippines, where entry-level nurses earn around 40,000 pesos monthly, far less than in many other countries.

“That salary is barely enough to cover daily living expenses,” says one 20-year-old nursing student in Surigao City. “So, the only way I can help my struggling family is to go abroad.”

And here’s where it gets personal: that student is a much-loved niece living with us while attending school. “Leaving my family will be hard,” she admits, “but I will just keep reminding myself to be strong. Everything I do will be to give my family the better life that they want and deserve.”

Another niece, now 23 and working full-time at a local hospital, admits to having mixed feelings regarding her profession. “Working in healthcare,” she says, presents the “enormous challenge” of assuming responsibility for the wellbeing of sufferers amid sometimes-dangerous nursing/patient ratios.

It can also be toxic, she adds, involving long hours, back-to-back shifts, and patients’ families who can be demanding, unappreciative, and disrespectful. Still, she concludes, “I’m grateful to [be able to] witness, learn, and experience [wonderful things].”

And yet she too would like to go abroad because, she explains, “Their technologies are more advanced and, more importantly, our services are well paid. I want to challenge myself to see how far this dream will go. Leaving will not be easy, but I’m better off missing my parents than thinking that the future holds no promise.”

Those farewells will be difficult. And yet I can only wish them fruitful and productive partings. Somehow, we will manage to continue without them. As must the rest of the Philippines.

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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book, Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise, was a finalist in this year’s Next Generation Indie Book Awards. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.

By David Haldane

June 29, 2026

He’s finally lost me.

Two years ago, I wrote a column called “Confession: Hamas Made Me Vote for Trump,” explaining why I considered his support for Israel strong enough to warrant my backing. Its gist: that Trump’s staunch opposition to the Iranian-financed genocidal attacks on the Jewish State would probably thwart them.

My emersion from the closet on that issue extracted some heavy costs. Primary among them: the complete rejection, renunciation, and excommunication by my own brother, a doctrinaire leftist whose Trump Derangement Syndrome far outweighs his reason or affection.

I still believe Trump was a far better choice than the alternative. But I have to admit that the now-President’s latest and increasingly shaky “peace” negotiations with Iran have left me cold. “Finally!” I began a column back in March after the latest war commenced. The US/Israeli attack on Iran, I declared, “marked the belated fulfillment of a wondrous promise…that the world might finally be liberated from a potentially lethal threat of historic proportion.”

Specifically, I believed then and now, the Iranian regime was the globe’s major exporter of terrorism, the primary purveyor of instability in the Middle East, an aspiring nuclear antagonist that has consistently promised to eradicate Western civilization, and a gang of radical authoritarians who’ve murdered tens of thousands of their own people as well as untold numbers of foreigner abroad.

“There is definitely new light at the end of this exceedingly long tunnel,” I concluded. “I’m praying that the oppressed people of Iran—as well as the rest of us—can get to it soon.”

Sadly, I must now admit, that light is quickly fading. The problem: after making boisterous promises, Trump seems to have lost his gumption for the fight, leaving Israel to go it alone.

I postponed proclaiming this publicly for a while, hoping I was wrong; that the seasoned dealmaker had something up his sleeve; that, as has happened before, the curtain would suddenly be pulled aside revealing a masterful leader at the top of his game. I still secretly harbor that hope. But the memorandum of understanding recently signed by the US and Iran, it now seems, leaves little room for doubt.

In essence, it roles the world back to where it was before the present conflict began. The immediate hostilities cease, as they had before. The Strait of Hormuz allegedly reopens, as it was at the beginning of this whole sordid affair. And Iran’s nuclear ambitions—which Trump has said are of paramount concern to America and the world—are back on the table to be resolved at a later date.

Exactly as they were before.

Oh yes, and Iran gets billions of dollars in previously frozen assets to rebuild infrastructure and, no doubt, renew its diminished military capacity. That, alas, is the only part of the agreement that’s new, though certainly not better. I’m sorry, but I see no way to view this other than a horrendous surrender by the US and postponement—not cessation—of the existential war that I’ve previously said, and still believe, is ultimately inevitable.

And last week’s collapse of the fragile ceasefire, followed by Trump’s umpteenth promise to “complete the job” by militarily driving the Islamic Republic “out of existence,” no longer, in my mind, carries any weight or credibility.

The stinging lesson: that economics is mightier than the sword. That, no matter what happens on the fields of battle, the final winner is he who holds the keys to the car. Or, more specifically, mans the gates to the world’s supply of fuel.

“This marks a dramatic shift in the Middle East’s strategic balance,” columnist Sagiv Steinberg wrote in Algemeiner. “Iran stood up to the world’s strongest power and emerged with an agreement enhancing its regional influence across the Persian Gulf. This sends a dangerous message to the region and the global order. Gulf states, clear American allies, now understand that Iranian bullying ultimately pays off.”

His conclusion offers the only potential for hope.

“They have also internalized another lesson,” Steinberg continues. “In the Middle East, there is only one country capable of effectively confronting Iran—Israel.”

I pray that it’s true.

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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist, author, and radio broadcaster with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book, Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise, was a finalist in this year’s Next Generation Indie Book Awards. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.

By David Haldane

June 22, 2026

I had hoped to spend Father’s Day with my son.

That may not sound like much but hear me out. Drew, 38, is mentally ill. And not just a little, but a lot: diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia at 19, he sees things that aren’t there and hears voices that aren’t real. Sometimes he even acts on those perceptions with tragic results.

It literally took his mother and me years of concerted effort backed by thousands of dollars and good connections to get him the help he needed. That ragged path was littered, among other things, with suicide attempts, homelessness, drug addiction, critical injuries inflicted by others, an attack on his father with threats to his mother, and, finally, six months in jail for assaulting a housekeeper seriously enough to put her in the hospital.

It was only then that the authorities finally honored our exasperated declarations that Drew was a danger to himself and others by placing him in a locked California mental health facility where he safely spent the last several years.

Until now.

“He was transferred yesterday,” my son’s court-appointed conservator told me when I called to arrange that Father’s Day visit.

“He what?” I stammered, truly stunned. “Where and why?”

“To a place that’s far less restrictive,” the conservator chirped. “He’ll be able to come and go as he pleases as long as he sleeps there and takes his meds.”

Oh my God, I thought, that’s a formula for disaster.

And sure enough, a call to the new facility days later delivered the bad news. “Oh,” a receptionist sighed, “sorry but Drew’s gone missing” apparently just three days after arriving.

In fact, my son’s wild inclinations may not be so unusual. A recent column in this newspaper cited World Health Organization statistics showing that one in seven people worldwide suffers from mental health disorders, most commonly anxiety and/or depression. As of 2021, that amounted to 1.1 billion people, and that’s just the small portion who get formally diagnosed.

The percentage in the Philippines is nearly as high: 11.3% to 11.6% as of 2019, amounting to roughly 12.5 million Filipinos. “…the major challenges,” Carl E. Balita wrote in that column, “include limited spending on mental health; the shortage of psychiatrists, psychologists, and mental health workers; and that access to services remains concentrated in urban centers.”

I have written extensively about the bias in much of the world favoring civil liberties over public safety. “The problem with mental illness in America is that nobody takes it seriously,” I declared last year after Nick Reiner—also suffering from schizophrenia—allegedly murdered his parents, renowned film director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle. “Or rather,” I concluded, “civil libertarians have determined that one’s right to be sick outweighs the public’s right to be protected.”

In other words, mentally ill people often “fall through the cracks,” as-it-were. The problem is that those cracks are wider than the floor.

Drew’s mom and I saw further evidence of that a week after our son’s disappearance when a mental health team randomly found him “wandering disoriented” on the streets of Los Angeles. “We didn’t know he had a conservator,” a nurse at the hospital to which he’d been taken told me after I’d informed her of that fact.

So I sent a text message to Drew’s legal guardian.

“EMERGENCY,” it began. “Drew is at [a hospital] in Montebello on a three-day hold…Releasing him back onto the streets would be disastrous for him and, potentially, anyone with whom he has contact…He has never taken his meds outside a controlled, locked environment. [Please] act immediately …before it’s too late and irreversible damage has been done.”

Three days later, the conservator called. Miraculously he’d just been updated on the situation and, in the nick of time, was recommending that Drew’s hold be extended pending possible recommitment.

Bottom line: our Father’s Day reunion will happen next year.

I fervently hope.

.

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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist, author, and radio broadcaster with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book, Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise, was a finalist in this year’s Next Generation Indie Book Awards. This column appears weekly The Manila Times.

By David Haldane

June 15, 2026

My six-year-old daughter said something mind-altering the other day.

We were nearing the end of our long nightly walk when she sidled over, beckoned me to my knees, and delivered several soft kisses to my cheek and neck. “Daddy,” she said in the loving little voice that has brought me so much joy. “You will still feel these kisses when you die.”

And just like that, my world changed.

I understood, of course, what had prompted her stunning declaration. At 77, I’m far older than most fathers with children her age. It’s something I consider often these days as I take measures to increase my chances of seeing her grow up, including that brisk daily walk.

What her sweet pronouncement told me, however, was that she’s thinking of it too.

“Thank you,” I said, as cheerfully as I could. “I will definitely keep those kisses with me forever. But don’t you worry, sweetheart, I will stay with you as long as I can. Which I hope will be a very long time.”

And so we returned home in peace.

I was reminded of that tender exchange by a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal informing the world that the oldest of the so-called baby boomers will celebrate their 80^th birthdays this year. Boomers, you might recall, are those of us born between 1946 and 1964, the years following World War II when millions of young men—and some women—returned home to make babies, resulting in, yes, a veritable baby boom.

Being the largest generation the world had yet seen, we certainly threw our weight around. Our desires created new markets, and our styles created new trends. Our music resonated loudly, much of it surviving to this day. And politically, we changed the world, creating a newly invigorated movement for social justice while both fighting and opposing the Vietnam War.

Whether all that ultimately benefited humanity is a discussion for another day. Whatever your opinion on that matter, however, one thing’s clear: that boomers have had—and, to some extent, still maintain—an oversized impact. “…a generation that shaped much of our past is shaping the future…” the Journal opined. More specifically, said Joseph Coughlin, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology AgeLab, “They are reinventing old age.”

Which brings us to my point.

Obviously, average global life expectancy has soared since the first boomers arrived in 1946. Then the median lifespan stood at just 45-48 years, whereas now most people live to 73 or 74. In the West, not surprisingly, those numbers were and are significantly higher: from the mid-60s then to the current median age of 80-83. None of which has satisfied the world’s remaining 1.2 billion baby boomers who, in America anyway, now aspire on average to reach 93.

“We were more like free souls,” explained one near-80-year-old still working at a financial tech company he founded with his son. “That allowed us to think out of the box.”

These days it translates into two major concerns: staying healthy and figuring out how to spend those extra years.

In my case, whatever time I have left will largely be devoted to caring for my two young children: a 15-year-old boy and the aforementioned six-year-old girl. They’re not my first, of course; those would be another 38-year-old son and 41-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. But the younger ones now occupy most of my time, energy, and a significant portion of my savings.

I never planned it that way. Nor did I envision my late 70s unfolding quite like this. But, hey, I’m a proud baby boomer; one of those ostensibly “free souls” who’s “reinventing old age.”

If I live to be 93, my daughter will be just 22. So I’m aiming for 100 to accompany her down the aisle, even if it’s in a wheelchair. Bottom line: when that little girl pecks me with kisses for eternity, it’s not a casual thing.

And eternity is how long I expect to feel them.

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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist, author, and radio broadcaster with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book, Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise, was a finalist in the 2026 Next Generation Indie Book Awards. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.

By David Haldane

June 14, 2026

You’ve probably seen them in photos.

A gigantic archway spiraling over Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles, California, marking the eastern entrance to that city’s Historic Filipino town. Entitled “Talang Gabay: Our Guiding Star,” the iconic gateway—the largest of its kind in America—is a vibrant symbol celebrating the cultural heritage of Filipinos everywhere.

Or the 150-foot mural adorning nearby Unidad Park. Recognized by the Smithsonian Institute as the flagship visual identity of Filipino Americans, the piece encapsulates centuries of Philippine history, depicting such heroic figures as Jose Rizal, Lapu-Lapu, and California farm labor organizer Larry Itliong.

And of course, there are the two award-winning Philippine-themed floats that have graced Pasadena’s famous Rose Parade beckoning in each new year, as well as the glistening shrine at LA’s St. Columban Church.

All of them were created by a man who describes his work as a lifelong mission. His name is Eliseo Art Silva. The mission: to resurrect what he sees as a lost Golden Age of Filipino art and culture. “Everything we need is already in front of us,” says Silva, 54, who lives in Corona, roughly 80 kilometers southeast of Los Angeles. “We just need to bring attention to that narrative.”

The narrative’s essence, he believes, reflects two previous eras of pristine achievement in the Philippines: the precolonial period, when Magellan first arrived on that nation’s virgin shores, and 1898 when the country threw off Spanish rule to briefly become the first independent democratic republic in Asia.

The task now, he says, is to artistically “center the narrative so that we are the protagonists of our own story.”

He wasn’t always a man on a mission. Born in Manila in 1972, the year Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law, Eliseo discovered art early. The oldest of seven children in a family of bankers and entrepreneurs, Silva remembers wrapping pandesal in the bakery owned by his parents. Eventually, he began drawing pictures on the wrapping paper, prompting his mother to buy him art supplies for school.

“I became an art star,” he recalls, “because my teachers would give me little books” to illustrate for classmates. Eventually, Silva—who sold his first painting at 11—began representing his school in art contests, usually with first-place wins. Later, he attended the Philippine High School for the Arts on a full scholarship, graduating with honors and completing his first mural at 14, just days after participating in the EDSA People Power Revolution.

All of which was supported by a home full of local art. “It was like a presence,” Silva says of the paintings and sculptures strewn throughout the house his family occupied. “I mean, Filipino art was everywhere.”

He was only 17 in 1989 when his family emigrated to America. Though initially reluctant to go, he eventually accepted the change. “I didn’t really want to be here,” Silva says today, relaxing in the den he shares with his parents in Southern California. “But I felt that God wanted me to come.”

And yet he hasn’t forgotten his native land, nor given up his Filipino roots. In fact, nearly four decades later, Eliseo is still the only member of his family who has never become a US citizen. “I didn’t want to be dual,” he explains. “I have no desire to be an American.”

And, indeed, life as a celebrated member of the Philippine diaspora has been touch-and-go. Today Silva’s time is largely spent fulfilling commissions to create murals or other forms of art, writing books, giving interviews, and making public appearances.

But it wasn’t always so. His work on the iconic “Gintong Kasaysayan, Gintong Pamana” mural at Unidad Park—probably the most famous Filipino artwork in America—started when Silva was a 22-year-old immigrant student working on his bachelor’s degree in fine arts at LA’s Otis College of Art and Design. “He did an amazing job telling the history of Filipino culture from the early days of colonialization [through] Jose Rizal to the California grape strikes,” says Lyle Del Mundo, a Filipino cultural consultant in Los Angeles and former board president of the nonprofit Search to Involve Pilipino Americans. “It’s all captured in this one piece.”

Later Silva received an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, which he attended on a fellowship. And, later still, he spent 12 years in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, creating many murals as part of a program sponsored by the city. Among them: “Tree of Life” integrating ceramic tiles created by residents representing community memories of Nicetown Park; “Heavenly Thoughts,” “Be the Change,” “Wall of Inspiration,” and “Coming to America and Making it Better” painted on non-woven cloth

But none of them had Filipino themes. “There wasn’t even one Filipino mural on the East Coast,” Silva recalls, “so I decided not to leave until I could do at least one. That was my goal, and it became my obsession.”

The result was “Alab Ng Puso” (My Heart’s Sole Burning Fire), a piece funded by the Filipino American Association of Philadelphia. Touted as, indeed, the first Filipino mural on America’s eastern shore, the work honors the martyrs of the 1898 Philippine War of Independence.

Another result was Silva’s first book; a collection of images entitled Filipinos of Greater Philadelphia, published by Arcadia Publishing in 2012. And he’s working on a second volume called Filipinos of the Inland Empire, referring to the region of Southern California wherein he now resides.

Returning to that region from Philadelphia, however, turned out to be more challenging than he had imagined. Depressed by financial difficulties and other issues, Silva relied on painkillers to dampen the hurt. Then he suffered a serious fall, landing in a hospital for two months, where he almost died. “I felt like that was it,” the artist recalls. “I thought I wouldn’t survive.”

Instead, he emerged with a new resolve to accomplish the task at hand. “I knew that God loved me and had a mission for me,” Silva recounts. “And that’s when I realized that nothing else mattered.”

And so, the work continues.

“He’s been one of our cultural bearers for decades,” Del Mundo says of Silva. “I see him as an artist, a friend, and someone who wears the Filipino flag on his sleeve. I think he does that without having to think about it; the knowledge he carries comes from living there [in the Philippines] and also living here [in America.] Through his work, he bridges both cultures.”

Cindy Domingo agrees.

“Eliseo has brought to those who view and study his murals a connection between Philippine history, Filipino American history, and how these elements influence and contribute to the formation of our local Filipino community,” says Domingo, a prominent Filipina American activist, labor organizer, and long-time community leader in Seattle, Washington. “He has brought the elements of spirituality; the people and faces who made history, both in the Philippines and in the US, and the institutions and symbols that contribute to making us who we are.

“In designing his murals,” Domingo continues, “Eliseo has shown that he is a historian as well as an artist, often uncovering historical facts that many in our community don’t know. To view one of Eliseo’s murals is to take a step into history as well as the present.”

And, finally, James Fishburne, director of the Forest Lawn Museum in Glendale, California, who curated a major exhibition of Filipino art including some of Silva’s work, describes him as “an incredible artist,” and “a very important figure,” in both the Filipino and Fil Am art communities. “He is passionate about Filipino history and culture,” Fishburne says, “and very proud of the impact Filipinos have had on American culture. Eliseo is a talented painter who has the ability to work in multiple styles. He seamlessly fuses elements of history in painting, pop art, portraiture, and surrealism, among other genres.”

All of which was broadened and accentuated by the recent fulfillment of a longtime dream: a three-year stay in the land of his birth. He went to the Philippines, Silva explains, because being Filipino is “about cultural authorship. It’s not blood or race, but identity. It’s about being centered and having a core.”

And that requires maintaining a firm connection to the homeland.

So, renting a five-bedroom house in Paranaque from 2021 to 2024, he created a vibrant studio and established a school offering residencies for art students from the University of the Philippines. He also began laying the groundwork for a permanent end to his exile abroad.

“Ultimately,” Silva says, “those three years were a vital steppingstone allowing me to prepare for my long-term return.”

His plan: to develop an “art hub” on family land in Laguna including a studio, income-generating apartments, and perhaps even another school in which to train a new generation of Filipino artists.

And it is there that he also hopes to one day marry and raise several children. “The Philippines is my goal,” Silva says. “The United States is a detour.”

And yet his mark in the US is lasting and secure. Besides the iconic pieces in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, his monuments include the Carlos Bulosan Memorial, Pilipino History Mural and Bob Santos Memorial in Seattle, Washington; the Filipino Migration Mural and Larry Itliong Memorial Mural in Sacramento and Delano, California; the Philippine Masters Collection in Carson, California; the Philippine Nationality Room at the University of Pittsburgh; and the Pinoy Capital Crown in Daly City, California.

Not to mention, of course, the untold number of monuments to Filipino identity he has yet to create. But perhaps it’s Silva himself who’s best qualified to explain that still unfolding legacy.

“I am a weaver of history and heritage,” he writes in an Artist Statement on his own website, “and my artistic practice is a site where worlds converge.

“At the heart of this work,” the artist goes on, “is a profound desire to reconcile the history of my lineage with the history of painting; I seek to restore images and stories that have been systematically erased, dimmed, or grayed over by the passage of time and the weight of colonial history. I believe art is the unparalleled medium for documenting history and our lived experience. As a chronicler of erased, marginalized, or suppressed stories, my work becomes a primary source of cultural authorship and sovereign light. It provides an effective means for communities to connect, thrive, and flourish in urban environments, inviting all to take that crucial first step toward compassionate interaction and empathetic engagement.”

And therein lies the color.

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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist, author, and radio broadcaster with homes in Southern California and Norther Mindanao where he writes a weekly column for The Manila Times. His latest book, Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise, was a finalist in the 2026 Next Generation Indie Book Awards. This article first appeared as a cover story in The Sunday Times Magazine.

By David Haldane

June 8, 2026

Reading the foreign press, you’d think they were heroes.

“A Hayward man who dedicated his life to advocating for impoverished farmworkers in the Philippines,” a TV news station in Oakland, California, dubbed one.

Speaking to the San Francisco Standard, the same man’s widow described him as “kindhearted, a fan of history and ‘Star Wars,’ a caring uncle, a loving son, and a thoughtful brother. Most of all, though, he cared for the everyday people of his homeland.”

She was speaking of Lyle Prijoles, 40, one of two Americans killed seven weeks ago in Negros Occidental during a clash between government troops and the New People’s Army. The other dead American was Kai Dana-Rene Sorem, 26.

“He died,” Prijoles’ widow concluded, “doing what he did best: being with the masses and learning from them.”

And that was the tipoff: the only people I’ve ever heard referring to “the masses” that way are doctrinaire communists paraphrasing Karl Marx. “Only the masses can break the rule of the old powers,” the famous revolutionary is often quoted as saying.

I thought about that weeks later after hearing several speakers at a Los Angeles Filipino festival invoke Prijoles’ name in calling for the “liberation” of the Philippines. “Don’t pay any attention,” my local Filipino companion quickly averred, “they’re just communists.”

And my suspicions were finally confirmed by a recent Daily Wire piece produced in collaboration with the Manhattan Institute; a New York-based public policy think tank. “Prijoles and Sorem were not outlier cases,” it concluded, “but part of a nation- and globe-spanning network of Filipino groups” committed to “a Marxist-Leninist conception of a people’s democracy led by a Communist vanguard.”

Hmm, I couldn’t help thinking, not so different from what the NPA says it’s fighting for.

Prijoles’ radicalization, according to the report, began around 2004 at San Francisco State University where he became a leader in the US chapter of the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines and, later, a Solidarity Officer for Anakbayan-USA, a militant Filipino youth organization former high-ranking communists say recruits fighters for the country’s underground communist insurgency.

“You say you don’t recruit for the armed struggle,” one told the Sun Star, addressing Anakbayan directly. “But how many of your members suddenly vanish from school, only to turn up in NPA casualty lists?”

Sorem, according to the institute’s report, got radicalized at Central Washington University in 2020, eventually launching Anakbayan’s South Seattle chapter. By early this year, it said, he was working as a full-time organizer in the Philippines.

Just in time to take part in the fatal altercation—in which 19 died—widely described as a “firefight,” meaning that the bullets came from both sides.

The reactions were harsh and swift. The US Embassy in Manila issued a warning to American nationals against affiliating with insurgent groups like the NPA, considered a terrorist organization by both the Philippines and the US. “Foreign terrorist organizations,” it said, “actively recruit Americans to participate directly in terrorist activities and/or provide financial support.”

The Philippines-based National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict expressed grave concern regarding “the increasing involvement of individuals from outside the Philippines in local armed hostilities,” citing the “disturbing convergence of foreign nationals in a live combat setting where the risks are immediate and the consequences irreversible.”

But in California, the reaction was decidedly different. “He cared about people deeply,” Sandra Stone, a San Francisco United Methodist pastor and fellow activist, said of Prijoles amid protests at the Philippine Consulate and calls for an end to US military aid to the Philippines. “He just wanted to create a better world.”

Sorry, but for my money the Manhattan Institute report seems far closer to the truth. “Prijoles and Sorem’s deaths,” it concluded, “were the tragic results of two Americans going down the radicalization rabbit hole. What started as innocent interest in their national origins ended in their deaths in a hail of bullets.”

My fervent advice to other would-be foreign radicals: please take heed.

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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book, Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise, was named a finalist in this year’s Next Generation Indie Book Awards. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.

By David Haldane

June 1, 2026

It’s a disruption that’s hard to imagine.

You spend years wooing a beautiful Filipina. You visit her provincial barangay to meet her and her family. Finally, committed and in love, you petition US immigration for a fiancé visa. Seven months later, boom, it’s approved and your sweetheart is enroute! You get married, excited by the prospect of a new life together.

Then she returns to the Philippines for another year or more of uncertain delay.

Save for the last bit, that was the process my wife and I navigated more than 18 years ago. But instead of returning to the Philippines, Ivy applied for her green card from the home we shared in California. And, just like that, obtained an Adjustment of Status to become a permanent resident and, eventually, a US citizen.

If we were to do it today, according to a new policy announced by the Trump administration, she’d be back on a jet to Manila before the wedding bells stopped ringing. Which, pardon my French, is about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t another rant repeating the usual liberal mantra that “Trump did it, so it’s bad.” In fact, I’ve long supported many of the President’s policies, including his loudly heralded insistence on enforcing America’s immigration laws. And while there have certainly been some unfortunate excesses, that policy has mostly succeeded.

This latest wrinkle, however—requiring green card applicants, including the spouses of US citizens, to apply from their home countries—is way over the top. Not just by yards, but by miles.

It’s “anti-family” and will “force apart husbands from wives and children from their parents,” howled a spokesman for World Relief, a Christian humanitarian organization advising immigrants in the US. “There’s simply no compelling reason for this cruel, anti-family policy change…”

I hate to say it, but I completely agree.

The administration has justified the change by calling status adjustment a privilege, not a right. The new policy, a spokesperson said, “allows our immigration service to function as the law intended instead of incentivizing loopholes. When aliens apply from their home country, it reduces the need to find and remove those who decide to slip into the shadows and remain in the US illegally after being denied residency.”

On the surface, that may sound fine and good. But very few green card applicants, in fact, end up slipping into the shadows. Which, for my money, makes this nothing less than an expansion of the battle against illegal immigration to include those who aren’t illegal at all.

“Legal immigrants enrich our nation and strengthen our society in countless ways,” President Trump said in his 2019 State of the Union address. “I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever. But they have to come in legally.”

It was that and similar statements that prompted me and millions of others to vote for him in 2024. But now, the President is changing his tune. We got a staggering preview of what that could mean in San Diego, California, last year when several married couples, appearing at the city’s federal building for what they thought were routine green card interviews, ended up leaving separately with the foreign spouses in handcuffs.

“I had to take our baby from my crying wife’s arms,” Stephen Paul, 33, told the New York Times. “It’s insane to have them rip our family apart. Whoever is directing this has completely lost touch with their mission to the country.”

Declared the family’s immigration lawyer: “In 25 years of practice, I have never seen anything like this.”

The new policy could impact 100,000 to 200,000 Filipinos now living in the United States, according to the Philippine Ambassador there, Jose Manuel ‘Babe’ Romualdez.

I sincerely hope none of them are my friends or relatives. More to the point, I sincerely urge President Trump to rethink this deplorable drift away from the promises that got him elected.

Pretty please. With sugar on top.

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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book is Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.

By David Haldane

May 25, 2026

It was the news I’d been dreading.

“Yup,” he said, “you’ve got some fluid in there.”

Had he been a mechanic discussing my car’s brakes, I’d have been happier than a puppy chewing a bone. But no, this was a doctor. More specifically, an eye specialist. And as he was discussing my left macula, any barks could only be gasps.

“But no worries,” the doctor went on, “we’ll just give you an injection in the eyeball. Your condition isn’t curable, but monthly injections should help.”

Which immediately reminded me of the scariest mantra of my ancient childhood: “cross your heart and hope to die, stick a needle in your eye.”

And that’s when the panic set in.

I should probably pause here to offer some background. My eyes and I are not close. Though I have provided them with minimal care over the years—mainly eyeglasses—we rarely speak and never touch. That’s why contact lenses are not an option. Because they would require, well, contact. And that’s something I simply can’t tolerate. The reason is pretty basic: it terrifies me.

So, you can imagine my consternation upon being told, years ago, that I suffered from age-related macular degeneration. Simply put, it’s the gradual deterioration of the macula, the part of the retina responsible for sharp, central vision. Which means that any downgrading eventually results in blurriness, distortion, or blind spots at that vision’s center.

The good news back then was that my AMD was “dry,” i.e. slow-moving and relatively stable. I could take a few vitamins, ignore it, and hope for better days. Ah, but now, I’m told, the condition has escalated to “wet,” meaning new blood vessels have grown beneath the retina, leaking fluid that could cause scarring. So, what once was stable is now not-so-much. And what used to mean blissful forgetfulness now literally requires a needle-in-the-eye.

In other circumstances, one might take comfort in the old adage that misery loves company. A study published by Lancet Global Health and Nature reported that, in 2020, roughly 196 million people worldwide suffered from AMD, with that number expected to reach 280 million by 2040. While the US, China, and India lead the race for top spot, the Philippines has its own problems with roughly .2% of the population—about 210,000 Filipinos—suffering from damaged or deteriorating maculas, according to a study by the Department of Health’s Philippine Eye Research Institute. And, due to an aging population, that number is growing.

None of which comforts me at all. The bottom line: I’m scared to death, not just of sight loss but perhaps even more of that needle.

Beyond the terror of inserting a sharp object into a soft fleshy sphere, of course, there are practical considerations. Soon I’ll be seeing a retinal specialist in Palm Desert, California, near where my family and I are spending our annual sojourn in America. Not long after that, however, I’ll be back in the deep provinces of the Philippines where needles aimed at eyeballs are fewer and farther between.

And here’s the thing: I’ve got no health insurance there. Which, given the estimated cost of 6,000-12,000 pesos per injection, is more than a minor consideration. Especially as I will require at least one prick per month.

So, here’s my list of questions for that specialist: Is there an alternative to injections (I don’t think so); what happens if I refuse them (probably nothing good); and can they put me to sleep during the puncturing process (I doubt it). Finally, how on earth will I be able to sit still?

“Oh, no worries,” the other doctor repeated in response to that question. “They’ll clamp your eyes open.”

Somehow that wasn’t reassuring.

Here’s the main question: which scares me more, that sharp hovering needle or being blind in one eye? Hey, I hear there are some really cool-looking eyepatches on the market. Then all I’ll need is a sword.

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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book, Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise, was a finalist in this year’s Next Generation Indie Book Awards. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.

By David Haldane

May 18, 2026

He was a prepubescent boy who thought he might be a girl.

So, 13-year-old Jonni Skinner went to a therapist. Who immediately confirmed his worst fears; that his effeminate ways would never be accepted. Then referred him to an endocrinologist for transitioning.

The medical specialist, of course, agreed wholeheartedly with the prognosis, even to the point of warning Skinner’s skeptical mom that any parental resistance could prompt the state to take immediate custody of her son. And that the most likely outcome short of transitioning would be his self-annihilation.

Which is how an innocent and confused young boy in rural Michigan ended up spending nearly a decade on puberty blockers and hormones to suppress the emersion of male characteristics in favor of those associated with females. And why he experienced deep physical and emotional pain, resulting in a body that may never be the same.

“I didn’t suddenly believe I was a girl,” Skinner recalled in a recent Free Press essay. “I believed what social media first introduced as a possibility, and what my doctor then told me was reality: that I had a girl’s brain in a boy’s body, that it was a biological condition, and that transitioning was my only chance to survive…What none of them told me was that the combination of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones had effectively chemically castrated me.”

I was reminded of Skinner’s story by a recent column inThe Manila Times. Entitled “PH schools at a crossroads,” the piece calls on the nation’s education system to embrace gender recognition for students whose sexual identities fall outside the binary norms. “It is not just about uniforms, haircuts, restrooms, or pronouns,” writes Joseph Noel M. Estrada, one of the Philippines’ leading education lawyers. “At its core, it is about whether our schools can recognize and protect the dignity of students whose gender identity does not fit neatly into the traditional categories written in our laws.”

And that’s when I stopped nodding in ascent. I certainly hope—and believe—that no intelligent, sensitive, or caring person would ever argue against protecting the dignity, safety, and wellbeing of students identifying as transgender. What troubles me about Estrada’s article, however, is the broader context and logical implication of the suggestion that Filipinos consider expanding their nation’s laws to recognize more than just two genders.

That the Philippines, in other words, follow the example of the United States. Which, forgive me, as far as I’m concerned merits only one response; a loud guffawing “God forbid!”

To begin with, of course, the sheer audacity of rewriting—in one generation—the biological realities that have withstood the test of time for thousands of years is, well, sheerly audacious! Beyond that, however, there are certain practical problems.

Between 2017 and 2021, the number of American children taking puberty blockers—generally in the firm belief that the effects were necessary, safe, and reversible—more than doubled. Some undoubtedly remain happy with the results. But a growing number—now adults—are speaking out against long-term consequences they didn’t expect or desire.

Earlier this year, a malpractice suit filed by one disillusioned patient resulted in a $2 million judgement favoring a 22-year-old who had transitioned as a minor. And recently the US Supreme Court upheld a ban on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for youngsters. It also struck down bans on so-called conversion therapy, a process whereby gender dysphoria can ostensibly be addressed without transitioning.

Which brings us back to Jonni Skinner, now 23 and identifying as a gay man. He recently traveled to my home state of California to testify against a proposed civil loophole that could resurrect that ban on non-transitional therapy. Enacting such a loophole, he wrote, “would put at legal risk exactly the kind of therapist I needed.”

Which presents us with a formidable challenge: how to treat transgender youth with dignity, respect and concern without embracing an ideology that betrays biology, safety, and reason.

I sincerely hope we can find a way.

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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist, author, and radio broadcaster with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book, Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise, is a finalist in the 2026 Next Generation Indie Book Awards. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.

By David Haldane

May 11, 2026

I often wonder what’s going on in there.

Do random thoughts rattle that addled brain? Does she feel fear, confusion, terror, or pain? Does she wonder where she is and why nothing’s the same?

I’m talking about my sister-in-law, Eva, whose entire existence is now on hold. Because last November her seemingly durable consciousness got yanked from its permanent mold.

That’s when she and her boyfriend, hopelessly inebriated, decided to take his motorcycle for what turned out to be a fateful spin. The completely predictable result: a horrific accident that hurled both of them to the blood-spattered pavement where he, wearing the only helmet, lay whimpering with a seriously shattered leg while she wallowed in the silent echoes of a seriously shattered brain.

Today, just over five months later, my wife’s 42-year-old younger sister spends her days and nights in a persistent vegetative state. Which is to say that she opens her eyes, looks around, and even exhibits pained facial expressions, though blind, mute, and showing only vague signs of awareness or comprehension.

“Given her relatively young age,” a doctor told us after the accident, “there may be some recovery, though it could take years.”

And indeed, we have seen minor improvement though its pace has been painfully slow. Which makes us wonder just what’s happening inside that banged-up head.

A recent article in the New York Times Magazine offered some clues. Two years ago, the article reported, the New England Journal of Medicine disclosed the results of a 17-year study examining 241 unresponsive patients in comatose, vegetative, or minimally conscious states. Using advanced brain monitoring techniques, the researchers made an astonishing discovery: that 25% of them could follow high-level mental commands.

When asked to imagine playing tennis, for instance, they consistently complied. Which meant, the experts concluded, that they were “covertly conscious” suffering mainly from a “disconnect” between their bodies and their brains.

“I interviewed many people whose loved ones had been diagnosed as being in a vegetative state,” author Katie Engelhart said in an interview accompanying her piece, “and whose doctors never even raised the possibility of covert consciousness.”

So, how would she treat a family member in such a condition? “I would speak to him as if he were aware,” Engelhart confidently asserts.

Which, interestingly enough, is exactly how my wife and her family speak to Eva.

But that study’s findings have stirred controversy in America, where most vegetative patients end up in nursing homes. Unless, of course, their families—informed by doctors that the loved ones in question are forever gone—choose to “pull the plug” on their existence by withholding critical care.

In Eva’s case, that was never an option. No one ever suggested it, nor would we have considered such a thing; a difference I attribute to culture. Is it because snuffing out a life—even a hopelessly unconscious one—offends the dictates of the predominately Catholic Philippines? Or is it simply that the country’s strong family values preclude such ragged outcomes? Most likely, I suspect, it’s a combination of both, amply supported by the law.

In any case, after several weeks in the ICU, we brought our silent sister home, transformed a bedroom into a makeshift hospital room, and hired several professional caregivers. Their job: to feed Eva through a tube in her stomach, administer brain-aiding vitamins, bathe her, massage her legs, and maintain the tracheotomy through which she breathes. And, yes, talk to her as if she’s really all there.

They’re not alone. Our house, in fact, has become something of a hub for visiting friends, relatives, and paid professionals there to aid in Eva’s care. Many of them have even moved in, including her two minor children for whom my wife and I now act as parents.

There are no guarantees, of course, that their mom will ultimately recover or, if she does, that she’ll ever be the same. But at least Eva’s alive. And, who knows, maybe one day she’ll even hear us.

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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist, author, and radio broadcaster with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book is Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.

By David Haldane

May 3, 2026

The message gladdened my heart.

“Can you help us?” it began. “We received an email regarding San Benito, and would like to know more…”

The sender was the press officer at the Israeli Embassy in Manila, a Filipina named Rose, who I’d worked with before and consider a friend. And San Benito? Well, let’s just call it a tiny municipality on the northwestern coast of Siargao Island, a place I hold dear.

“We received an email from their mayor asking for a humanitarian partnership for food security,” Rose continued. “Do you know anyone there?”

Boy, did I!

In fact, the mayor in question is related to my wife, who was born and raised on that rustic island where, yes, the price of rice has reportedly skyrocketed beyond the reach of many residents. So, my dear spouse immediately contacted the dear mayor, who, within hours, responded with a long letter offering details and documentation. Which means that Israel is now seriously considering her request.

Why does that gladden my heart? Because, aside from the obvious satisfaction of helping people in need, it puts a positive face on one of my favorite countries in a place where that visage has been badly disfigured.

Let me explain.

It all started early last year when, following a dramatic upsurge of tourism in what’s been touted as the surfing capital of the Philippines, local Siargaunons complained that the foreign influx was negatively impacting the island’s culture and tranquility.

That discussion quickly singled out one nationality in particular; the highly visible population of Israelis alleged to be rude, demanding, and unruly. Then it got political; detractors described the Israelis—mostly young people vacationing after their military service—as “war criminals” whose “occupation” threatened a defenseless Philippine island. The Palestinian foreign minister publicly demanded that the “invading” Israelis be “tried and held to account.” And finally, classic antisemitism raised its ugly head in the form of cruel tropes likening Jews to Satan.

All of which broke the heart of this longtime supporter of Israel intimately connected to the island that so many of its citizens favor.

The latest brouhaha occurred last month after an old video resurfaced showing a violent altercation between several transgenders and a group of young Israelis boasting that their country was “the most powerful” in the world.

“We have never been disrespected and assaulted like this,” one LBGTQIA defender posted on Facebook.

And that’s when the authorities got involved. “Our surfers who give lessons have also been complaining that some foreign tourists don’t pay after receiving the tutorial,” former Congressman Bingo Matugas said in an interview, adding that not all of the offenders are Israeli.

The town of General Luna, where most transgressions occur, issued a statement warning tourists that any violations involving “environmental damage, disorderly conduct, illegal activities, disrespect toward locals, or non-compliance with regulations” would be dealt with severely.

And even the national Bureau of Immigration got involved, promising to escalate its monitoring of foreign tourists to punish those overstaying their visas or otherwise breaking the law. The penalty: deportation and blacklisting.

Let me say for the record that I’m not defending misbehaving Israelis. On the contrary, I applaud the increased enforcement and urge that all violators, wherever they’re from, be punished accordingly.

That said, however, I agree with Matugas that not all violators are Israelis and highly doubt that most Israelis are violators. Which is why I’m happy to help introduce that other Israeli face to the locals: the side that’s here to help.

To be sure, San Benito wouldn’t be the first Philippine municipality to receive Israeli aid. The Embassy, to mention just a few of its projects, has supported a women’s health center in Pasig; created elementary school libraries in Cavite and Quezon City; donated relief packets to typhoon victims in Bicol; provided 16,000 antigen test kits during Covid; and financed a solar power plant in Quezon.

My fondest hope is that rice for San Benito will soon be added to that list.

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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist, author, and radio broadcaster living in Northern Mindanao. His latest book is Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.

By David Haldane

April 27, 2026

“We had prayed for this day to come,” he said.

The speaker was Marcus Luttrell, a former Navy SEAL in favor of using psychedelic drugs to treat American military veterans with serious mental health issues.

The place: President Trump’s Oval Office where he had just signed executive order fast-tracking research into the therapeutic benefits of LSD, Ecstasy, psilocybin, and other powerful hallucinogens. “We’re taking this…decisive step,” the President said, “to confront one of the most urgent public health challenges facing our nation; the mental health crisis.”

Declared W. Bryan Hubbard, another outspoken advocate for just such a step: “Federal prohibition of psychedelic medicine in America is over.”

I have often written of my own long-ago encounters with these organic transformers of inner space. Believe me, they ran the gamut from a delightful afternoon communing with spirits in an old Vermont graveyard to a somewhat more challenging morning surfing the waves of Huntington Beach, California.

That last one, unfortunately, culminated in an uncomfortable confrontation with an innocent young woman who, for some mysterious reason, aroused my bone-rattling ire. It also forever ended my psychedelic experiments for a far clearer reason, namely my gut-wrenching fear.

Recently, however, I met another American here in the Philippines whose past psychedelic experiences were more positive and productive than mine. Meet Christopher Blackburn, precisely the sort of military veteran at whom Trump’s order is aimed. Blackburn, now 65, spent four years during the Cold War of the 1980s serving as a US Navy machinist’s mate aboard a submarine in the Pacific. Its assignment: tracking, analyzing, and keeping tabs on potentially threatening Soviet vessels.

“We were a fast attack-type submarine,” he recalls. “We just carried a lot of torpedoes and chased Soviets all the time.”

All of which was fine and good until he got out of the service and couldn’t hold a job. Not to mention becoming an alcoholic, suffering many automobile accidents, and getting arrested for assault. Eventually, the former submariner received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) and was awarded a full disability pension. He also began taking various antidepressants, which offered some relief for a time.

Until they didn’t.

And that’s when Blackburn decided to try psychedelics. But with few exceptions, they were illegal in the United States. So he made himself one of those exceptions by joining the Oklevueha Native American Church, a Utah-based organization religiously exempt from the aforementioned legal restrictions. And, sure enough, it did the trick.

“Basically, you go into another universe,” is how he describes sitting blindfolded around a campfire in the woods while under the influence of magic mushrooms. “I felt like I was communing with space aliens who were reaching into me and fixing all my organs. I’d feel long tentacled fingers go inside and then pull out, repairing all kinds of damage. And seven hours later, all the PTSD symptoms would be gone.”

Which is probably something like what early Native Americans felt practicing their religious rituals after ingesting peyote or ayahuasca, a psychoactive plant brew from the Amazon traditionally used in the indigenous spiritual and healing ceremonies of Peru, Brazil, Columbia, and Ecuador. Minus only the lingering trauma of having spent years in a submarine full of explosives.

Blackburn doesn’t use psychedelic drugs anymore, he says, because he’s found something far more effective: a loving Filipino wife and three beautiful children with whom he lives in the house they built in Surigao City.

“I don’t need the mushrooms here,” he says, and somehow, I believe him.

Not everyone, of course, can find all that. And so, with Trump’s endorsement, the traditionally slow wheels of medical research will hopefully move faster. “These developments mark a meaningful shift in the federal government’s approach to psychedelic policy and drug development,” the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies declared in a statement following the President’s order. “Today’s Executive Order reflects growing recognition that modern mental health challenges demand new approaches.”

To which I can only bellow “yeah!”

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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist, author, and radio broadcaster with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book is Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.