Time nails it in their Man of the Year.

2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person.

I’ve been waiting for someone to tell me to shut up and go back home to the States. But I feel I have every right to provide my opinions on what’s going on in the Philippines because - get this - I’m a member of the same human race you are.

John Robb talks about the:

the inexorable decline of the legitimacy of nation-states within a globalized environment

Whatever rights you may have as a Philippine citizen are just arbitrary. And, as we’re watching with Con-Con and Con-Ass, quite arbitrarily arrived at and a product of their time. But people-to-people connection goes as deep as our existence.

I care about what happens here. I want to have a voice in it too. And there’s no more need for justification beyond that. The societal times we’re living in are starting to recognize and value that legitimacy.

You rock, Time.