Four days in February

I WAS a government employee during the last few years of the Marcos dictatorship. During that time, people were not expected to publicly criticize the government, especially if you were part of it like I was, no matter how inconsequential your role might be.

There were a few exceptions however. One of them was Jose Burgos Jr., publisher of the We Forum, and his irreverent band of writers. I bought copies of the newspaper whenever my budget allowed (I think it came out every one or two weeks) and openly read it in the office during lunch or coffee breaks. Each time I held the pages high enough for onlookers to see, I derived some amount of pleasure running a little body language survey from among my officemates. The common response was that they saw nothing, or more likely they pretended not to see anything. But the boss, to my surprise, was something else. The first time he saw me reading it, I could sense he was tolerating “academic freedom.” At one point he even came over to ask if he could borrow a copy.