DIDN’T know until yesterday that the Feast of the Magi, which used to be on 6 January, had been moved by Vatican II to the first Sunday of the New Year.

But even without the traditional headline, I would have guessed that the Christmas season was over with the resignation of Undersecretary Zosimo Paredes, executive director of the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) Commission.

Paredes resigned because he found his position untenable considering that his stand was opposed to that of Malacañang regarding the VFA. Still, it wasn’t diametrically opposed: He didn’t have any problem with the surrender of custody to the US Embassy but was merely objecting to the manner in which it was carried out.

For expressing himself, a feisty senator called for the abolition of the VFA Commission, which, however, was rejected by the President even as she affirmed the US Embassy spokesman’s judgment that it was premature to review the VFA.

Indeed, it will always be premature to review our international relations, especially our relations with the US. Such a daunting and strenuous activity requires maturity and we are only 62 years old as a formally independent, more or less sovereign, nation.

The great nations of the world took hundreds of years to attain political, economic, cultural, and social maturity.

To review a complex phenomenon such as our relations with the US (and other nations, for that matter) is too excruciating, as it will require a good look at the mirror.

It isn’t that we haven’t done so from time to time; it’s just that having taken a good look at ourselves, we stopped at doing something about it. A facelift is a simple enough surgical operation, but a changed self-image that should result in an altered, or rectified, national consciousness is not only exhausting but lacerating.

We have always left the responsibility to the "next generation."