The hundredth day before Christmas heralds the second half of September. Counting down from the 16th may be what alarms us when this first “ber” month sidles up to us with its own clock, with hands not ticking but revolving.
Still, numbers have other reasons for dancing in our heads this month as we approach the season that hallows the year’s dying and rebirth. Workers across businesses, at least, have to account for resources and opportunities that providence sent their way in 2025, whether or not they endure a last quarter crunch.
September was a year’s seventh for centuries when Roman calendars had room for no more than 10 moons. Septem, Latin for seven, passed into nomenclature for lunar cycle no. 7.
Now ponder 21. Cebu celebrates its own Press Freedom Day for the seventh time on Sept. 21, 2025. The day became a special working holiday in Cebu by virtue of Republic Act 11122, promulgated in October 2018. This year’s press celebrations likewise mark a decade since the Lower House, Cebu Provincial Board and Cebu City Council separately dedicated Sept. 21 to honoring the liberty of the press.
Three government entities acted on the multiplier effect of one Cebu Citizens-Press Council, and three times seven brings us back to 21.
The late Ferdinand Marcos backdated Proclamation 1081 of Sept. 23, 1972, placing the Philippines under martial law, to Sept. 21 because 21 is divisible by his lucky number, seven.
No one in her or his right mind would consider herself or himself fortunate to be responsible for remembering the somber figures that historians trace back to that superstition-flecked presidential declaration.
How much was plundered?
By how much did the economy shrink (including through the shuttering of critical
news organizations)?
How many were summarily executed, arrested without any warrant, subjected to farcical trials, forcibly disappeared and tortured (including journalists)?
What is the price of a human life?
How much are our liberties worth?
What is the cost of inundating social discourses with post-truth constructs?
Communities can only pose these questions. It has taken and takes ecologies of truthfulness, led by conscientious journalists and historians, to seek and report the answers both by the numbers and in stories of people with names and faces and flesh and blood.
The counting and storytelling must continue until those who have much to answer for repent. Without repentance, national unity (misused as a pall in an attempt to cover our martial law and “drug war” trauma) remains as visible as Andersen’s emperor’s new clothes. Naked power keeps flexing itself, burying an impeachment case under a public works corruption mess that is buried under a game of Trip to Jerusalem at the top of the Philippine National Police, which is buried under charges of corruption among journalists, which are buried when our eyes turn to The Hague as we continue to seek justice for “drug war” victims and turn back home looking for disappeared owners of fighting roosters.
When will the burying ever end?
Conscientious journalists ensure that no interment of stories is ever permanent, and we have reason to wonder whether those who sing of freedom and heroism and nationhood while they demonize the messengers and fragment the nation as they lie and dissimulate are enamored of Andersen’s imperial textiles.
In the early first century, a Jewish taxman whom we remember on Sept. 21 in the sanctoral left his bureau, having realized that there was more to life than extorting and scheming, wheeling and dealing. The collector, Matthew, followed his Galilean master.
When the time came for Matthew to write the greatest story ever told, he apparently tapped his network of sources and reported that mouthpieces had been paid to try to erase the story and bury it with lies.
Draw this lesson from Matthew, on a free press: The powerful will often have the numbers in terms of money and supporters to hide and deodorize their skeletons rather than expose them for proper closure. But journalists, beholden to nothing but the truth, will keep digging.
They will outlast the undertakers.