Joy, 59

I first ran into Joy de los Reyes over four decades ago, when barricades rose and the streets were on fire. We were combatants, members of what were called “composite teams,” militants expected to hold the line against police charges to protect the main formation of demonstrators.

We became unlikely but fast friends. He was from the Samahan ng Demokratikong Kabataan (SDK) and I from the chauvinistic Kabataang Makabayan (KM). He emanated from the public schools of Aklan and I from a suburban Catholic school. He was always disorganized and I was an obsessive-compulsive, task-oriented bastard. Besides, he had such an unlikely name.

He was studying to become an engineer and I was supposed to become a lawyer. Neither of us lived up to our original plans. Joy fell in love with philosophy and I became immersed in political economy.

We must have consumed a few thousand cups of coffee between us through our college years, arguing over essentialism and structuralism, the “movement” and the politics of our time. It took about two decades, I think, before Joy was finally awarded his bachelor’s degree in philosophy because he refused to take ROTC (the requirement was eventually abolished).

Shortly after martial law was declared, Joy joined the Daily Express as proofreader. I visited him there, loving the scent of printer’s ink. While waiting for galley proofs, he read Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and then the works of Heidegger and Habermas. He was surely the most literate proofreader in town. He would rather read than sleep.

He encouraged me to write movie reviews for that paper, the only thing that could be written with any satisfaction during a time of tight censorship. I did.

In the late seventies, we set up the Critical Studies and Research Group, a loose and chaotic network of intellectuals that sometimes seemed to be doing more drinking than writing. But the fraternity kept our morale high, supplied us a community where dissident ideas may be shared. The Left was about as suspicious of us as the Right was. We defied every convention and interrogated orthodoxies without mercy.

Joy took to journalism with the same passion he once reserved only for philosophy, rising to become editor-in-chief of Malaya. The former occupation kept his family fed; the latter preoccupation made him a happy man. Until the last few years, he participated in an informal group called the Diliman Book Club where members took turns reviewing the latest opuses.

When we greeted his first son, I insisted that being a de los Reyes he should name his son Isabelo, to honor a great Filipino patriot. He did.

Over the last two decades, Joy and I saw less and less of each other  although when we did, we could discuss through the night our thoughts and our sentiments without inhibition. In between, we raised families, sustained careers and dealt with the unavoidable tragedies. Susan succumbed to cancer shortly after Jane did. Joy sat with me through the otherwise unbearable chore of seeing through Susan’s cremation.

Last year, Joy pulled me aside to say he was diagnosed with advanced stage lung cancer. I looked at him in the eye for a while, grasping for something to say. I finally, managed to mutter: “All of us, we all have only one chance to die with dignity.”

And he did, unrepentant to the end. The man, generous to a fault, left with no regrets and no rancor. He died as peacefully as he lived.

Food

In an electoral campaign where there is so little discussion on policy, only Jack Enrile takes up the cause of food security.

The advocacy builds on pieces of legislation he introduced as representative of Cagayan. Among these is HB 4626, or the Food for Filipinos First bill, seeking to reorganize the malfunctioning National Food Authority into a National Food Supply and Reserve Corporation. Through this campaign period, Enrile organized caucuses in every province, drawing feedback on how to devise a strategy to assure sufficient and affordable food supply.

I do have some questions to ask Jack about the adequacy of a food security strategy centered on a subsidized public agency. Food security (and accessibility) ought to be the objective of a comprehensive national strategy. It is the alpha and the omega of poverty alleviation.

So many of our people go hungry not because food is scarce but because it is priced inaccessibly. The issue is really all about food accessibility. The solutions rest on a broad range of concerns, from improving domestic logistics, introducing policies that enable aggregated farm systems and liberalizing food trade.

I submit our food situation is all screwed up because our food policy is heavily politicized. Those who control the votes during elections control our agricultural policies, making them short-sighted and incoherent. I will discuss this matter at greater length in the next column.

At any rate, although the present campaign encourages little public policy debate, it is a good thing candidate Jack Enrile puts food policy on the table. With the hunger and poverty figures we now see, a comprehensive discussion of food and agricultural policy is extremely urgent.

Should Jack Enrile make it to the Senate (an outcome made likely by the power of the Solid North vote), we should expect him to catalyze this urgent debate on food. We will soon face shortages in a number of food items. Those shortages will be due to vested interests and a bankrupt agricultural policy.

Jack Enrile could be a little more provocative in addressing the weakest aspects of our agricultural policy.