MANILA, Philippines - I learned about it at the most unusual hour and the most unusual place. And the effect was, well, rousing.

That was quite literally so. My cell phone started ringing at close to 4 a.m. where I was, which was in a place called Preston, a town more than a couple of hours away from London by train, where we had gone to as part of the program to observe how Muslims were living in the United Kingdom, particularly after 7/7. I had just begun to slide into a deep sleep after a long day and bitter cold, when my phone began ringing shrilly. “Have you heard what’s happened?” a friend reported energetically, a preface to a revelation that instantly put the dread in me. I wondered who had just died or was arrested in the Philippines, which almost axiomatically means someone who did not deserve to do so or be so.

He then proceeded to tell me that Danilo Lim and Antonio Trillanes had walked out of their trial in the company of their guards and had holed up in the Peninsula Hotel. They were all set to hold a press conference in an hour or so. A crowd had begun to gather at the hotel, and Malacañang had called for an emergency meeting. Some bishops had gone to the hotel. Another friend texted dramatically, “It’s happening….”

I switched on the TV, waited for news of it in BBC, and gave up after an hour. The only overseas news that was repeated again and again was Pervez Musharraf giving up control of the military and donning on civilian clothes as president of his country. There were interviews of several people to determine if his formal cession of military rank really indicated any substantive change—his successor as head of the military was a loyalist protégé—or if the opposition, which had been protesting the validity of his election—he had run for office while head of the armed forces—would be appeased by it. There was nothing on the Philippines.

A few hours later, however, just as we were about to hop on our bus, pictures flashed on the TV of a group of heavily armed men in uniform gathering in what seemed like an incongruously posh location, and an announcer announced that the Philippine police was about to storm a hotel where some military rebels had holed in. But before I could learn more about it, I found myself being dragged away to the bus. These people take their time deathly seriously, and when they say you start off at 8:15, you do not start off at 8:20. Hell, you do not start off at 8:16. My journalist friends, in whose company I was thrown in for the week, were sympathetic. One said, “I bet you wish you were back in your country.” Another said: “That’s right, it’s not just about being a journalist. If that were happening in my country, I’d be worried too about family and friends.” They thought it had the makings of civil war.

My mind wandered off for much of the morning, as my cell phone kept ringing (though on silent) for the next couple of hours. I could only pity those who kept sending me text messages, not knowing where I was, their frustration at what took place over those next couple of hours being compounded by a future shock at their Globe or Smart or Sun bill for November. Someone summarized what had happened at the end of those two (long, for me, who was kept in the dark) hours: “It’s over.” What was happening had clearly stopped happening—if indeed it had any chance of unraveling at all.

I would learn from the Internet later how, like most things in our country today, Danny Lim and Antonio Trillanes’ threatened uprising ended with a whimper and not with a bang. Though the staff of Manila Pen and several journalists would probably dispute the lack of a bang altogether. The police and special forces apparently made an overkill of it—the journalist community interpreting it, with good reason, to be an effort not just to quell a mutinous uprising on the part of some military groups but to quell feisty reporting on the part of those groups in media that still believed in a free press—even attempting to squeeze a tank through the Pen’s front door with disastrous consequences for its architecture.

I would read some of the blogs later asking what’s with Trillanes and hotels—then it was Oakwood, now it’s the Pen—and how many more hotels he’d ruin before he’s through. Others would ask why anyone would want to try to overthrow someone who would be stepping down after a couple of years or so anyway. I’ll deal with those concerns tomorrow and show why my sympathies lie in the opposite direction.

The more thoughtful, and truly depressing, comments came from people via e-mail and text messages. One summarized his dismay in this wise: “Human behavior is content to let others do the work to get for us what we are unwilling to do for ourselves.” My own thoughts drifted to Burke’s famous line, “All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing,” and I wondered if we hadn’t just added whole new dimensions to that in recent days. Here we are confronted by a government that daily regales us with spectacular corruption, corruption of the body and corruption of the soul, the theft of money and the theft of morals, and we are unable do anything about it. And when some people try to do something about it, are too indifferent, too lazy, too insensate, to add our voices to it. All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing? All it takes for evil to riot is for some good men to do something and for everybody else to think only of Christmas shopping.

I didn’t bother to tell my journalist friends about it anymore, but for a while at least I was glad I was out of the country. Some bitter colds are less bitter than others.

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