Leadership starts at home; enlightened by truth
A written speech by Dr. Marivir Montebon for the online forum on February 25, 2025 “Women Leaders speak on peace building and shaping the future,” organized by the Universal Peace Federation and the International Media Association for Peace.
Peace is essential for us to shape and to even begin to think of a bright future. Leadership starts from home and a good future is enlightened by truth.
Excerpts:
Thank you, UPF, IMAP, and Ray for having me. It’s an honor to be here.
Peace is essential for us to shape and to even begin to think of a bright future. What is peace? On a personal, family, community, and global level, what does that look like? To me, peace is a state of mind and heart and physical and cultural condition where I could thrive. That is true for every living creature.
The conditions for me to thrive are a harmonious home, a nurturing school, a safe community and country. I am blessed to have these conditions that enabled me to become the person that I am now, a journalist, a mother, a friend, a mentor, and a citizen of the world.
As a woman, what is my station in life where I could contribute to peacebuilding and chartering a bright future?
Foremost, being a mother is to be a leader, a hyperlocal leader, right in your own family. My only child, btw, passed on five years ago due to colon cancer. And I am constantly navigating my grief. My daughter’s memory is my energy and although she’s in a lovelier cosmic spot, she is in my heart and is my moral compass as ever.
Motherhood changed me. I no longer thought of myself first. I thought of earning and saving money for my child. I had to strive to be a good person because I was raising a child for the world. That was my adulting thought. Motherhood brought out the best in me. And of course, I miss my daughter every day.
Leaders are mentored. Mine came in through the women in my family. My mother Jocelyn, an accountant, and my grandmother, a dressmaker and a baseball player at her school which was then run by Americans in the Philippines.
On their shoulders I stand. They were disciplined, hardworking, very strict, pious, and focused on raising us well in the most honest way they knew. My grandmother, Lola Nara, is the voice in my head. She would scold me and spank me if I was misbehaving. The women in my family were the real leaders in our daily lives.
Of course, my late father was a man of generosity and humor. And my grandfather, I got his meekness, quite the opposite of the dragon-like feistiness of my grandmother.
Young people follow what they see in the family. It’s not much on what sermon or the yapping of our parents that we follow. It’s through their actions, their hard work, their fairness that we are also being shaped. It is in the home that leadership by example is first and best seen.
I am from a modest middle-class family, but the love of grandparents and parents was abundant as the eldest child and grandchild. That was a good start to life.
From my elders, I know the practical things in leadership: the basics of good nutrition, enabling education, and emotional support. These for me are the elements of nation-building as well. On the values side, leadership is about leading by example, or ethics, and integrity.
Then journalism. I felt the love of writing at a young age, at eight years old. During our talent session in the mornings, I would volunteer to read a story that I wrote to my classmates. The others would sing or dance.
I was a campus journalist in college, despite my father’s disapproval of journalism. The university student paper opened, and I was one of 20 of 200 applicants accepted. It was the twilight of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. I naturally became an activist, using the campus paper to see and express local turmoil.
Ray Lipowcan, moderator of the forum on Women Leaders as Peacebuilders in chartering a Bright Future, with Katarina Connery (upper left), Cindy Pfeiffer (upper right), and Marivir Montebon.
A flashback - Marcos ordered the shutdown of the press as his dictatorship loomed in the 1960s. I was not born yet. When his popularity dwindled and the economic crisis was getting off hand, people voiced their discontent, insurgency was growing, corruption rampant.
In 1986, the Philippines was free from Marcos in a bloodless uprising, which Marcos Jr. is trying to erase. I was a teenager at that time at the university.
A few years later, Germany patterned the same bloodless uprising with the breaking of the Berlin Wall.
The press was alive again in the Philippines. In the legislature, representation of sectors through the party list system was enshrined. But these two gains were not enough to completely establish an equitable society and a robust economy. The Philippines had so much unlearning to do – the culture of corruption and submission.
All these years, my journalism has become my calling. I became a socio-political and cultural observer. As a journalist, it is up in my alley.
Today, I am here as a naturalized citizen, and journalism is undergoing a completely different transformation. We are now in the digital age of social media, the blood stream of public and private communication. All messages, pictures, and documents go through the digital highway. We can say that digital technology is the new king.
Corporate media like CNN, Fox, New York Times, etc. are on social media as much as my small media company is.
Digital technology has caused the death of the print industry, newspapers and magazines are nearly obsolete. Radio, TV, cable, movies, and music are on social media.
The challenge of social media and digital technology is its very own nature of being manipulated by its users and owners. Therefore, getting into a bright future, with all the conscious and massive effort of undermining real and truthful information is humanity’s greatest threat.
Today, digital manipulation could change election results, your face, your bank account, your news story.
These alterations could be made by tech people privately without witnesses to these crimes. No legal cases could be built without witnesses. For now, there is no hypothetical or practical answer to this digital challenge, not even a cybersecurity lawyer that I had recently interviewed.
Thus, the alleged intervention of Cambridge Analytica or the alleged stealing of elections by Marcos Jr. remains hearsay, because there are no witnesses to the actual digital manipulations and could not prosper in court. This I believe is the greatest danger we are facing.
We will reach a bright future if we begin with the truth. Truth is our light. Correct information, based on research and digging of facts, is the first step to charter a bright future. We cannot do that with partial or complete lies.
That is the challenge of journalists like me - to be courageous frontliners for truth. My mentorship now for young people is to write narratives of truth. To stick to the what, when, where, why, and how of information gathering and contextual writing.
The full recording of the forum Women in Leadership: Building Peace, Shaping the Future.
I’d say that we can achieve a bright future when we have a genuine connection with our past. This means acknowledging our personal and family history and knowing our local and national history. We must come to terms with our past to create a better future.
If we look at our immigration history, for instance, we could not hate immigrants when we know the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act which ushered the coming in of non-European immigrants to work in the medical and education sectors, and the farms of America. This is the reason why America is teeming with diversity.
The journalist’s role to uphold the truth as our no. one ethic continues to be sacred and important for humanity as it was then.
A journalist’s life could be perky and perilous. In both cases, bravery and courage are needed to shed light on truth for humanity to see.
As an endnote, peace to me is just having the much-needed good night’s sleep every night, knowing that I did my duty to espouse truth always. #
