As we write this column, mourning and anger pervade the social atmosphere in our country.

Two young athletes with big dreams perished in an unfortunate accident in Aurora province in the course of a team-building activity. Their untimely demise has caused the atmosphere today to be highly emotionally charged. While we do not wish to add fuel to the incendiary emotional environment, we also do not want to pretend that we do not see and share the grief that envelops us.

We grieve with the parents of the two young athletes. No parent should ever have to bury his or her child, as the saying goes. My wife and I know the depth of the pain that comes with that task following the death of our youngest daughter several years ago. The parents of Rene Clert Baterbonia and Divine Adili will now have to perform the ritual of laying their children to their final resting places. We stand by them in prayer during this sad moment in their life.

One person who would have been devastated by the news of the two young athletes’ deaths would have been Dr. Jose Rizal. He, too, was young and devoted to sports and athleticism when he faced death.

This Friday, June 19, the Nation will mark his 165th birth anniversary.

In this day and age of short attention spans, viral outrage, and political theater, it is easy to treat Dr. Rizal as nothing more than a marble statue—revered on currency, recited in school plays, then promptly forgotten.

Yet the uncomfortable truth is that Rizal’s ideas remain more urgently relevant today than they were in the dying years of colonial rule. His diagnosis of our national ailments was so precise that reading his novels Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo feels less like historical fiction and more like tomorrow’s newspaper.

As pointed out by historians and experts on Dr. Rizal, the national hero was not a flawless saint. He was a man of contradictions: a reformist who abhorred violence yet inspired revolution; an intellectual who loved his country yet chose exile; a doctor who could not heal the cancer of colonial abuse.

Our view is that it is precisely these complexities that make him worth remembering. He refused the false choice between blind loyalty and blind destruction. In our time of binary shouting matches—pro-this administration or anti, globalist or nationalist, progressive or conservative—Dr. Rizal’s measured radicalism offers a better path.

His greatest gift was clarity of sight. In the Noli Me Tangere, he exposed the hypocrisy of religious authorities who preached heaven while clutching power. Replace “religious authorities” with today’s elements in society who monetize outrage, and the satire still lands.

Dr. Rizal understood that the real enemy of progress is not merely foreign domination but the internal cowardice and self-interest that enable it. “Ang hindi marunong lumingon sa pinanggalingan ay hindi makakarating sa paroroonan,” he wrote. Those who do not look back at where they came from will never reach where they are going.

Today, many of us scroll past our own history, chasing foreign trends while our own problems fester—poverty that refuses to die, education systems that produce graduates who cannot think critically, and a political culture that rewards “charisma” over competence.

Education was Dr. Rizal’s lifelong obsession. He believed the pen was mightier than the sword because an educated mind cannot be easily enslaved. Yet observers point out that our current system still churns out rote learners rather than critical thinkers. PISA scores remain embarrassing.

Many graduates memorize Dr. Rizal’s poems for exams but never internalize their warning against indolence and ignorance. We celebrate “Filipino pride” on social media while tolerating substandard public services and brain drain that sends our best nurses and engineers abroad.

Dr. Rizal would not be surprised. In El Filibusterismo, the character Simoun warns that reform without genuine education is futile. Come to think of it, we have built malls and airports but neglected the minds that should fill them with purpose.

Perhaps most relevant is Rizal’s insistence on moral courage.

He returned to the Philippines knowing it could cost him his life. He faced execution with dignity on December 30, 1896, refusing to recant his writings.

In an era of anonymous keyboard warriors and public figures who evade accountability, Dr. Rizal’s example shames us. We have succumbed to “cancel culture” rather than honest reckoning. We see performative activism instead of the quiet, persistent work of reform that Dr. Rizal embodied—founding La Liga Filipina, writing, teaching, and building communities even in exile.

Critics sometimes dismiss Dr. Rizal as too “assimilationist” or insufficiently revolutionary compared to Andres Bonifacio.

Our view is that such debates miss the point. Dr. Rizal never claimed to have all the answers. He demanded that Filipinos first become worthy of freedom through virtue, industry, and reason. Without that foundation, independence would not bring about the individual and collective transformation that progress requires.

Has history proven Dr. Rizal right?

We salute the national hero who, at 165, remains relevant.