I used to be easily moved when people cried. I am not made of stone; despite what some might think, tears can still reach me. Perhaps most of all, I was moved when men cried. I have always believed that tears begin where language gives up—and as I wrote in Let Him Cry, there is nothing shameful about tears for a man or a woman. Sometimes, crying is the healthiest proof that a person is still human.
Then politics happened.
When I saw senators crying publicly—cameras rolling, microphones waiting, media positioned perfectly for the close-up—I did not feel sympathy. I felt exhaustion.
These tears were not for hunger, disaster, injustice, or the quiet grief that ordinary Filipinos endure every day. They were tears over imagined persecution, manufactured victimhood, and a dress rehearsal for a tragedy that never reached opening night.
Perhaps that is why the performance no longer works. We have become unwilling experts at recognizing real suffering. We have watched families rebuild after typhoons, parents skip meals so their children can eat, overseas workers spend years away from home, and patients wait outside hospital doors hoping their names will finally be called. None of them had television cameras following them. None of them rehearsed their grief.
That is why carefully timed displays of emotion no longer persuade as easily as they once did. People are tired—tired of emotional theater disguised as sincerity, tired of public officials treating accountability like oppression, and tired of being manipulated through dramatic pauses, trembling voices, and conveniently timed breakdowns.
We know what real pain looks like. Real pain rarely calls a press conference. More often, it waits quietly in hospital corridors, evacuation centers, overcrowded jeepneys, or at dinner tables where parents insist they have already eaten. Real grief has very little interest in an audience; it simply asks to be endured. A single, restrained tear from someone genuinely wounded carries far more truth than a televised emotional collapse designed for sympathy points.
What makes it even more disappointing is that these are senators. We elected legislators, but somewhere along the way, we got method actors—leaders supposedly raised with refinement, ethics, and public dignity. But power and money have a strange way of stripping away polish. We are told that education refines character and that good breeding produces good manners, yet money and power erase both with astonishing efficiency.
The public has noticed. That is the real tragedy here: not that politicians cry, but that people no longer trust their tears when they do. Because once emotion becomes strategy, even genuine grief begins to look rehearsed.
The audience left long ago. Only the actors are still performing.
