The Alex Eala bandwagon has officially left the station, and, right on schedule, some political passengers are climbing aboard with press releases in hand.

Every Filipino sporting breakthrough now seems to come with a predictable side event: a sudden burst of official affection for the athlete, the sport, the youth, the flag, and whatever else can fit into a congratulatory statement. The athlete trains for years. The politician drafts a tribute, files a resolution, or posts praise after the victory is already public. Somehow, both are expected to share the glow.

This is not statesmanship. At its worst, it is basking in reflected glory with better lighting.

Eala does not deserve becoming another backdrop for political grandstanding. She won the matches. She carried the pressure. She did the work. Some politicians, meanwhile, appear only after the victory, claim emotional proximity, and call it public service.

In the Philippines, when public praise turns into self-insertion, the word is hard to avoid: epal.

If these officials truly care about tennis, youth development, and Filipino athletes, they can start somewhere less glamorous than the victory parade. Fund courts. Support coaches. Build programs. Fix the systems that leave athletes scrambling for private resources, family sacrifice, and foreign training just to compete. If they helped build that path, they should show the record. If not, the applause is cheap.

My conjecture is simple: the timing, repetition, and low political cost make this sudden affection look politically convenient. Alex Eala is admired, nonpartisan, inspiring, and safe to praise. Attaching themselves to her moment lets politicians look patriotic without solving anything, supportive without spending much, and visionary without having built a path for anyone to follow.

Eala earned the spotlight.

The epals should stop blocking the view.

I got my original Instagram account back.

That is a sentence I did not expect to write anymore.

Out of nowhere, I received an email from Instagram Security with a recovery code. It was not a reply to any recent support request. It was not something I triggered. It just arrived.

And somehow, this time, it worked. After nearly two years of being unable to log in, I was back inside the account almost too easily. No maze. No dead end. No vague error message. Just a code that finally did what recovery codes are supposed to do.

The funny thing is, now that I have the account back, I am not even sure what to do with it. I had already given up on it. I had already started publishing photos here on the website. At some point, I stopped thinking of Instagram as something I needed to recover and started treating it as something I had lost.

So now what? Start over? Clean it up? Leave it alone? Use it only to point people back here? I do not know yet.

But make no mistake: I am glad to have control of the account again. I do not know if someone from Instagram support saw my post and quietly pushed the right button. I do not know if this was just some delayed automated recovery process finally working after all this time. (I mean, they locked me out!)

I will probably never know. For now, I am just glad the account is mine again.

It is amusing, in the bleakest possible way, when Catholic-dominated Philippines and its Church-deferential media class casually brand other religions as “cults” the moment members of those groups stage political protests that disrupt traffic, classes, work, and business.

But when Catholics do the same thing—particularly when bishops themselves urge the faithful to take their politics to the streets—the tone suddenly changes. The disruption becomes civic duty. The inconvenience becomes moral witness. The spectacle becomes democracy in action. The same media that sneer at one religious crowd often turn reverent, even sycophantic, when the procession carries the more familiar cross.

The hypocrisy is not subtle. It is merely normalized.

Most religions preach some version of mercy, restraint, and humility before judgment. Yet history and daily life keep showing how easily those teachings are discarded when the target belongs to another church, another sect, another tribe. In the Philippines, even Catholics can turn vicious toward fellow Catholics who vote differently, worship differently, or question the wrong authority. The contempt only deepens when the other side belongs to a different denomination altogether.

This is why the sanctimony rings hollow. Religion is often sold as a civilizing force, a moral anchor, a path toward compassion. But too often, it becomes another uniform for tribal arrogance. It does not soften judgment; it blesses it. Too often, it does not make people kinder; it merely gives them holier words for their cruelty.

And when every side believes “heaven” has endorsed its prejudice, the world does not become more moral. It only becomes more comfortable mistaking prejudice for righteousness.

My fear is simple: what if the state-witness arrangement with former DPWH Secretary Manuel Bonoan becomes less about exposing the flood-control scandal and more about containing it?

In theory, turning an insider into a state witness can make sense. Corruption schemes are hard to prove through documents alone. You need someone who can explain how the machinery worked: who approved what, who pressured whom, who benefited, and how the paper trail was made to look legitimate.

But that logic becomes harder to accept when the insider is not a clerk, a contractor, or a middleman. Bonoan was the secretary of the very department at the center of the scandal. If someone at that level is offered immunity or practical protection, the public has every right to ask: protection in exchange for what?

The danger is a managed performance of accountability. Bonoan is converted from accused to witness. He names contractors, district engineers, technical officers, and other replaceable figures. A few people are sacrificed. The headlines announce progress. The government claims it is serious. But no political patrons are touched. No powerful beneficiaries are exposed. No major fish are caught.

That would be a betrayal dressed up as prosecution.

A state witness should not become a legal detergent for washing away the liability of someone near the top of the chain. If Bonoan truly knows how these projects moved, then his testimony should lead upward, outward, and inward — to the people who planned, protected, funded, approved, and profited from the scheme.

If all he delivers are fall guys, the public should not be impressed. It should be suspicious.

The test is not whether the government can produce names. It can always produce names. The test is whether those names reveal the real architecture of corruption. If the witness points only downward while the powerful remain safely outside the frame, then this is not accountability.

It is damage control.

There comes a point where we have to look at a tragedy and stop treating the perpetrator like a lost child who just made a terrible mistake. If a teenager is capable of planning an attack, acquiring a weapon, and carrying out an act that ends multiple lives, our legal system has to ask itself a deeply uncomfortable question: why does the offender’s age protect them more than the victims’ lives protect theirs? It starts to feel like we're sending a dangerous signal; that childhood can become a shield, even when it's used to cut other childhoods tragically short.

I know the juvenile justice system was built on genuinely compassionate ideals; the belief that young people deserve room to grow and change. But that compassion feels hollow, even insulting, when we're talking about premeditated violence. There is an unbridgeable gap between a kid caught shoplifting and a teenager who walks into a school with a weapon. Yes, rehabilitation matters; we can’t give up on the idea that people can turn their lives around. But rehabilitation without meaningful accountability starts to look less like justice and more like avoidance. We owe it to the victims; who were just as young and full of potential; to face that hard truth. They are not supporting characters in this story; they were children too, and any system that weighs the offender's age more heavily than their futures has lost its moral compass.

There is something revealing about Senator Kiko Pangilinan having to go on the defensive every time a minor commits a horrifying crime. If the Juvenile Justice Law were as firm, clear, and reassuring as its defenders claim, it would not need this much emergency explanation whenever blood is spilled. The fact that its author must repeatedly insist that the law is “not a get-out-of-jail card” only proves how easily it looks like one to the public.

One can already imagine the coming contortions: someone, somewhere, will try to explain (or politically exploit) these boys into heroism, as if murder becomes social commentary when committed by minors. No! Bullying, neglect, poverty, trauma, or institutional failure may explain parts of the story, but they do not ennoble the act! These were not rebels. They were not symbols. They were children who killed other children, and any politics that forgets that has crossed from compassion into obscenity.