CONTINUE OUR Lucky Streak.
So goes the official theme for the celebration of the 9th anniversary of the cityhood of Mabalacat.
So swept under the rug the trials, tribulations and turmoil attendant to the struggle to transform the fourth class municipality into a component city. Luck be the lady, indeed, lord to the triumph!
There is this most apparent predisposition with luck in the Mabalacat City Government at the assumption of Mayor Crisostomo Garbo: MCG under MCG – lol, ain’t that twice lucky?
Why, the very first slogan at Garbo’s first coming was (still is?): Give Change a Chance. Chance, luck’s very essence. As in its basic dictionary definition: Good fortune; advantage or success, considered as the result of chance.
The cityhood of Mabalacat came as sheer luck, and everything good thereafter. Hence, the wish for the streak to continue?
With luck in, whither God goeth?
“By the Grace of God and the Sovereign Will of the People, We are Now a City” proclaimed tarpaulins all around Mabalacat at the time President Benigno Aquino III signed into law RA 10164 “Act Converting the Municipality of Mabalacat in the province of Pampanga into a Component City to be Known as Mabalacat City” out of House Bill 4736 authored House by Rep. Carmelo “Tarzan” Lazatin and sponsored in the Senate by Sen. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., chairman of the Senate Committee on Local Government.
The public sinner Mayor Boking Morales had the epiphany to invoke God as the very cause of Mabalacat cityhood.
Irony at its starkest – the born-again Christian Garbo ascribing it and all the good things that have since come the city’s way to luck. Or has the good mayor ever read in his edition of the Good Book that things don’t happen because of luck, as they are known beforehand by God?
Thus, Ephesians 1:11: In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will.
A paradox therefore: “We can’t believe in a God who is in control of our future all the time, while also believing that events happen randomly or that God himself is subject to chance and gets lucky.”
For all the laying-of-hands-in-prayerful-benedictions, no more than a garbled gabbler of biblical babble in MCG there.
Shame.
