Alberto Reveniera was one troubled man: he made a noose, put his head in it, and hanged himself.

Several local newspapers published a picture of his body still suspended in air. Reveniera's suicide note, which accompanied the grisly photo, explained why he killed himself. Apparently, he was dissatisfied with the Roxas administration then in power. The poor man from Bohol instructed his wife to "teach our children to burn pictures of (Pres. Manuel) Roxas," and to "write to President Truman and Churchill and tell them that here in the Philippines, our government is infested with many Hitlers and Mussolinis."

"I have no power to put under Juez de Cuchillo all the Roxas people�so I sacrificed myself," Reveniera lamented in the letter.

Had he been born several decades later and heard of People Power, he probably wouldn't have killed himself.

Then again, had he been in one of my classes a couple of weeks ago, someone else would have killed him and just about everyone else in the Philippines.

A professor brought up the topic in one of our discussions on the laws of mass media. I don't know how we ended up talking about graft and corruption in the country, but it certainly had everyone's attention riveted to him when he made quite an uncoventional cure-all prescription.

The professor, who also happens to be a lawyer, illustrated his points in metaphors. We can be likened to a tree, he said. A tree rooted in infected soil will acquire that infection. Even if you cut the tree down, in time it will grow back, still as unhealthy as before.

Or we can take the case of blood transfusion, he further reflected. No matter how often we replace the diseased with new blood, still the contaminated will eventually pollute the freshly tranfused portion, and the process will just be a repetitive cycle, not exactly leading to permanent cure.

What is he getting at? We asked the professor.

The tree must be uprooted, he answered. Discontinue the transfusion-what we need is bloodshed.

Sir, we cajoled. Gone are the days of Andres Bonifacio and the Himagsikan. There are no colonizers to speak of. Our ancestors have driven them away a century ago. We are now a free country. We have no need for bloodshed, more so now that peaceful revolutions and people power are very much in vogue.

Exactly, the good professor hastened to add, his eyes dilating to stress the point. Then his glare shifted and trailed onto the newspaper on his desk. For a while, he studied the headlines: lawyers of a deposed president fighting to keep him under mansion-er, house arrest, senators squabbling over election turnouts, terrorists running in circles around the military�The latter story was sidebarred with a boxed feature on a sexy starlet offering the bandits her body and all in exchange for the freedom of the hostages.

We held our tongues while the professor was apparently lost in deep thought. Apparently, the more he read, the more convinced he was of his proposition. When he finally looked away from the newspaper, he seemed drained of his earlier passion for argument. He stared blankly at the wall, then at us.