Victims’ suffering is central and foundational to a truth commission, serving in fact as the core justification for its existence and the primary metric of its success.

Talk is cheap. We should have learned that lesson yesterday. Our verbosity alone will not drive China’s ships away from our exclusive economic zone. Words must be backed up by a coherent strategy and determined responses that imposes costs on them. Recovering control of our waters, after it was given up by the Duterte administration before, will require a long, arduous and incremental campaign, one island at a time, one feature at a time, one mission at a time.

The audacity to ask for our tears when she shed not even a single teardrop for the thousands of voiceless Filipinos destroyed by state bullets in the bloody carnage of her madman Rasputin.