Nandy and Michelle

He may now belong to what former ambassador Tita de Villa calls “the walking cane club,” but Reynaldo “Nandy” Pacheco soldiers on, pushing his advocacies and speaking out about the many causes that occupy his time, his mind and his heart.

At the launching of his biography “Nandy Pacheco: The Man Behind Gunless Society,” friends spoke not just of the man and the memories triggered by this slim volume, but also of the Christian principles that underlie Nandy’s passions.

Coauthors Gerry Lirio and TJ Burgonio, both longtime reporters and editors of this paper, open the book with an account of Nandy’s childhood during the war years in Bataan and Bulacan. In boyhood, he showed off the innovation, eagerness and hard work that characterized his adult life. Indeed, it was a leap from his provincial boyhood to his college days at the University of Santo Tomas, his pursuit of a legal career, and then his launching of a career in public relations, most notably with the local United Nations office and the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

It was Nandy who led the effort to rename Isaac Peral Street in Manila to United Nations Avenue, because two UN offices — the World Health Organization and the United Nations — were then found along its length. To this day, this stretch of road remains the only such thoroughfare bearing the UN’s name.

But it was only after his retirement from ADB that Pacheco founded the advocacy that would always be associated with him: the Gunless Society.

The group initially pursued the environmental cause. But as the number of gun-related crimes — from ordinary criminal activities to seemingly random, casual homicides that were usually transformed by the availability of handguns — increased alarmingly, Pacheco realized that the proliferation of both licensed and unlicensed guns was the biggest “polluter” of the times.

The premise behind the Gunless Society was pretty simple: tighter regulation of gun laws, and banning the use and carrying of firearms in public unless one was a law enforcer or soldier. Sadly, the draft “Gunless Society” bill would repeatedly meet with obstacles in Congress, not helped any by the lukewarm support of the national leadership. This led to Pacheco founding, along with key supporters like Santi Dumlao, a political party called Kapatiran that sought to offer alternative faces and voices in our political life.

When I saw him at the book launch, Nandy was a fragile, more vulnerable version of his old crusader self. But in his response to the many accolades sent his way, he was focused entirely on his advocacy, reiterating the message that he had been preaching for decades and proving that he is what Randy David calls “the model of the citizen-activist.”

I spent the past few days with my nose buried in another book: “Becoming,” the biography of former US first lady Michelle Obama. The book follows the narrative arc that begins with her childhood in the South Side of Chicago amid the large Robinson clan, then on to her move to Ivy League institutions Princeton and Harvard where she pursued a law degree. It was while working as a lawyer at a “white shoe” Chicago law firm that she met a law student “with an unusual name,” Barack Obama. Their mentor-mentee relationship would blossom and deepen into a romance, marriage, and then to a partnership that brought them all the way to the White House.

But it was Michelle’s account of how Barack proposed marriage that I found most enticing. For years, she and Barack had tossed around the question of marriage, with Barack proving resistant. During a celebratory dinner, Barack brought up once more the marriage debate. In the middle of her usual rant, Michelle saw a waiter leave a covered dish and when he lifted the dome, she found a small ring box.

“It took me a second to dismantle my anger and slide into joyful shock,” she writes. “He’d riled me up because this was the very last time he would invoke his inane marriage argument, ever again, as long as we both should live.”

What a charming tale. And what a nostalgic look back at a couple and a presidency and a time when decency and polity still ruled!

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