The Meaning of Risk is Not Always the Same

April 28, 2026

When I was about Alyssa Alano’s age, I didn’t just go on immersions, as I wrote about previously.

During the campaign for the 1986 snap elections, for example, I travelled for several weeks with fellow UPSCAns to places like Marawi City, Jolo, Cotabato City, and Zamboanga City. These were hotspots back then, and places that people with no real business being there avoided. They were controlled by warlords, patrolled by soldiers, and contested by Muslim separatist fighters.

We were there to train communities to protect the ballot. We were funded — unofficially — by the campaign of Cory Aquino (although I am not sure if she even knew about us), with one clear condition: they could not be responsible for us.

It is not an exaggeration to say we could have disappeared one of those nights, walking on dark, unpaved roads after a seminar.

That should have been enough to make us hesitate. But we went anyway.

We went because we believed it was the right thing to do. Because fair elections mattered. Because people deserved to know how to protect their vote.

But if I’m being honest, we also went because we were young. Because we were with friends, because it felt like a fun adventure. Because there was something compelling about going somewhere we were not supposed to go, for a cause we believed in.

It sounds shallow now. But that discomfort says more about my age than about the wisdom of what we did.

Did we know the risks? Yes. But we knew them the way the young know things — clearly enough to acknowledge, not deeply enough to be stopped.

Today, I would not make the same choice. Not because it was wrong, but because I am no longer the same person. I have different priorities, a different sense of loss, a different relationship with risk.

Age does that. It makes you careful. Measured. Hesitant.

So when people — especially those from my generation — say Alyssa should not have been there because she knew the risks, the judgment feels too easy, and more than a little self-righteous.

It applies the caution of age to the instinct of youth, and mistakes that difference for foolish failure.

As I’ve often said, we do not want our young to refuse to take risks, to stay only in safe spaces, to never leave what is familiar, to never test what they believe against the world as it is.

That is not how they grow. It is not how they find principles to fight for, or learn to care about something larger than themselves.

Which is why they must be protected — despite themselves, and especially when they take the kinds of risks only the young are reckless enough to take.

Responsibility cannot be allowed to shift so easily. The burden of restraint must ALWAYS lie with those who carry arms, who hold power, who make life-and-death decisions in moments like these.

Soldiers should not be allowed to dive into an encounter, leave nineteen people (including civilians) dead, and then just say those who died knew what they were getting into.

That is not accountability. That is evasion.

And if the government accepts it, it becomes permission.

I am not saying that the military should not be allowed to defend itself. But we also have to remember what is lost in tragedies like this, and therefore make room and rules to ensure that our soldiers are not so trigger-happy.

What is lost is not just a life, but everything that life might have become — the contribution never made, the work never done, the understanding that will not fully form.

It is no coincidence that many of our most venerated heroes began, and often died, young. Jose Rizal and Andres Bonifacio were in their twenties when they began resisting Spanish rule, and both died in their early thirties. Martin Luther King Jr. rose to national prominence in the US at 26 and died before 40. Nelson Mandela began his activism at 22, and though he lived to 95, he spent 27 years in prison.

Their lives remind us of the value, perhaps even the necessity, of the foolish courage of the young.

And that only means something if we are willing to protect them when they choose to take risks that we, as “more reasonable and wise” adults, will not.

Not by keeping them from the world. But by expecting the government — and our soldiers — to protect the space the young need to take risks, to make mistakes, and to find their way toward something real.

“They knew the risks.”
“They were stupid.”
“They never should have been there.”

Probably, yes. But they also knew the rewards — or at least had a glimpse of them.

The chance to see the world more clearly.
To test what they believed against reality.
To stand, however briefly, for something that matters.

That is how they learn.
That is how they grow.
That is how they begin to care.

And if we punish that — not just with self-righteous criticism, but with indifference to what happens to them — then we are not teaching the young to be wiser.

We are teaching them to be smaller.

That is not the lesson we should be teaching.