Since I was a child, I’ve often noticed jeepney drivers, conductors, and mechanics wearing one over their shoulders or keeping one handily tucked into their pants pocket. Even though our street corner was teeming with jeepneys all day long, we didn’t use it at home. So I had always associated it with the hoi polloi, the Great Unwashed of the streets.
Then I became an activist. Driven by martial law repression, I went full-time into underground activism from 1976 onward, with Metro Manila as our regular AOR, plus some parts of Cavite and a strip of Bulacan as our “rear base,” sort of. There I first met up-close the plebeian Good Morning Towel, aka GMT. Continue reading “Good morning, towel!”