MANILA, Philippines?The first time I saw Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, I thought she was pretty. I was 13, and there was a poster across the street from where I stood waiting for the school bus. She wore a deep blue suit, her hair was in a braid, and she was holding a red rose. It was 1998, and she was campaigning for the vice presidency. I won?t swear by the image, the suit might have been red and the rose might have been white and her hair might have been short, but I remember thinking she was pretty, and hoping she would win because she seemed like a nice lady.

She became president when I was 15, after everyone I knew went to Edsa in January of 2001 to denounce a mustached man with a pompadour. My father thought I was too young to go, and so we sat at home and watched on television, as the nice lady took an oath before a cheering crowd in black.

I write this now, nine years later, my first column under a government without Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her white-knuckled grip on the national reins. The country is fat on optimism, flying on the wings of a karaoke-singing President whose voice boomed strong as he swore a promise to a sweating crowd at high noon. Gloria is gone, off to be president of her fiefdom in the north. There is a new President, whose first days, fumbling as they were, showed a decided partiality towards rights and justice. Blow out the smoke, holster the guns, there is freedom, there is beauty, there is truth and love.

As may be patently obvious to anyone who has read this column in the last three or four years, I find faith a rare commodity. Faith, after all, is a risky proposition when you spend nine of your formative years being indoctrinated by a loving government that optimism is a refuge for fools. The Philippines I know is a place of blinking neon lights and small grimy hands shoving into purses and pockets, of dead men in cardboard boxes and suicides in high-class malls. Justice does not come only because justice should, being hungry does not mean a McDonald?s meal with extra rice, and sometimes, turning a key on a front door is all that is necessary to warrant death.

Understand that I did not believe all these things in the beginning. Young writers are told very often to write about what they know, and so I wrote of high heels and possibilities and the brightness of September fire trees. It wasn?t some instinct of conscience or goodwill that had me digging into rapes and disappearances and the varying histories of the last government?s savagery. It was disbelief, an unwillingness to accept that the pretty lady was a butcher and that there were men who had no compunctions about sticking shards of wood into communist vaginas. One question led to another, one column to the next: the dead man had a lost son, someone said the pregnant girl had been seen, a 9-year-old girl named Grecil died in the mountains and was called a communist rebel.

I suppose everyone can pinpoint some sort of grand growing-up, the tipping point, the moment when the stiletto heel breaks on the way to the senior prom. Mine happened when I was 19, at a church refuge in Sta. Rita, Bulacan. The sunlight shot off the tin roofs as a man with a bullet in his elbow staggered forward on his mother?s arm, towards a wooden bed inside a cramped room. His name was Patricio Manahan, and he was home when armed men came hunting for his militant brother Arsenio. Arsenio was not home, so they went for Patricio instead. Three shots, neck, elbow, arm, bang, bang-bang. I had a notepad, I had a pen, I stopped writing when he reached down to pick up his 2-year-old girl and realized he couldn?t take her in his arms.

That all this happened in the government of Gloria makes it possible to believe that life will be different under Benigno Aquino III. That?s the promise of democracy: that no matter if a leader fail, there is a next one who can take her place, someone better, someone who deserves our trust. It is a cycle that is both vicious and promising. The fall of Joseph Estrada led to the expectation of a president who would not plunder the national coffers and play footsies with the drunken tycoons of the Chinese mafia?and yet we had what was perhaps the most savage administration since the Marcoses decided to introduce their New Society. Now the end of the Arroyo regime comes with the buoyant anticipation of a state whose national policy is not butchery, whose watchword is accountability. It is one thing to hope, but it is another to expect.

Hope springs from the heart of darkness, optimism from a sense of expectation, of entitlement. The jobless American has a right to his optimism, can expect the welfare check and the basic medical care and the certainty that his child will not need to scrounge in wet trash outside a hotel parking lot. Hope is not the conviction that things will turn out right in the end; it is the dogged persistence that in spite of the possibility, the probability, that things will not, we stand anyway. Those of us who live in this country have no right to optimism, but we have every right to the stubborn, defiant belief that that today is history, that what we do matters, that it is worth it even if we lose. It is why we will continue to demand and defy, even if there are no certainties, no calculable ends, no real messiahs, only men who try.

This is not to say I do not have faith in my President. I do not expect perfection from the Aquino government. I believe, quite frankly, that Noynoy Aquino is carrying much more than he should. The weight of myth and legend is a terrible thing, an impossible demand from someone who is only a man. I doubt even the reality of Ninoy Aquino could have lived up to the demand made of his son today.

Hope is, as Vaclav Havel puts it, a state of mind, not a state of the world. For almost the entirety of the Arroyo administration, Edita Burgos went from court to camp, searching for her son even if there was no reason to hope he would be found. If this government fails, she will walk on, court to camp, rally to rally. It is the reason why Raymond Manalo managed to escape from the chains and the beatings and the chunks of blood in buckets, even if he risked certain death. In the nine years of the brutal administration of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, we did not stop hoping, the protests continued, the vigilance remained, even if the woman was blind and deaf and careless of those she served.

This is what I will promise to remember, every day, for the next six years: the 13-year-old boy who, somewhere in this country today, sees Noynoy?s face on a poster and believes.