Filipinos have everything everywhere all at once on their plate nowadays and moving forward, or backward as it were. There is sports and sovereignty, basketball and border issue with crime and charter change in the mix.
Thankfully, there’s an award-winning film that has the same title that won the recent Oscar award for best picture. Thankfully, it’s an American movie to complete our colonial satisfaction. Thankfully, it’s a comedy,too and not a farce as Karl Marx had predicted history. Or we have the reverse of his intellectual peroration.
For now, like the main character in the movie, we feel we have had a myriad of existential experience, from rejection to disappointment, but we should not be distracted into achieving our ultimate Us. The best is yet to come, according to the late President Fidel V. Ramos. The movie can be a catharsis for us, historically at least.
Let’s push fast forward to August when the American basketball team comes to town to play our most favorite sport as we host the World Cup. The US will play either against Spain, a once world colonizer, or Argentina. A perfect, timely match-up should be against China. Maybe that’s the reason, and the invisible nine-dash line it will not happen. It could be a catalyst , or worse. Bottom line: it should reveal where our heart really is, given Jose Rizal’s agony and hope before and why he became a national hero. He thought the Filipinos would take a century to arrive at their true selves.
Not yet Pepe, not yet.
Before that happens, we hope that former senator Leila de Lima would finally beat our justice system and have her freedom, bail, if you will, granted after six years in jail, or custody to make it sound like she was a guest who overstayed her welcome in a military camp. By that time, the whole gang of those who barged into a house of a governor and shot him and others in cold blood would have been accounted for. And yes, the mastermind(s) shall have been arrested,too, thieves or not. Pun intended there.
Hopefully, the Ukranian war or invasion would have ended as well—never mind the victor, whether it was a Vlodomry or a Vladimir. ( Russian names, like Chinese’, can be both challenging and confusing. In our neck of the woods, bongbong or junior usually means like father, like son, or destiny. So don’t hold your breath, when a retired general who described the joint police-military effort to capture the Negros Oriental massacre perpetrators as the lowest move before it becomes a full-blown martial law. It makes people jittery, against historical context. What can happen, Murphy’s Law says, will. Certainly, the nation would rather have an overkill than, although they could mean the same thing.
We have been. numbed by the roller-coaster movement of fuel prices we have come to like it, like a movable feast .We have even forgotten how the price of rice continues not to be right, and that we need a new Cabinet member in agriculture to make things happen the right way. White onions have stopped our weeping over the golden value of the red ones. We still cry a river, though, over other things which the present Malacanang tenant has promised he will deliver.
One thing is clear above his promises: he will not throw his infamous predecessor under the bus for alleged crime against humanity before the International Criminal Court, which is set to finally rule on the second appeal by the Philippine government not to pursue it. We will do it , we can do it ,so let us just do it, says the government lawyer. August will be historic, basketball-wise or justice-wise. We usually prefer a win-win situation.
The debate on constitutional change isn’t settled yet. No doubt our respected representatives, who can’t said to be highly, have re-confirmed their mindset which has been known to be not constitutional in spirit nor substance. At the very least, it confirms John Mill’s fear: some or most in a democrat system will be found wanting and lacking where it matters. And isn’t just about the head, but the heart.
In the House of them, a resolution was passed announcing the balance of power still works in the Philippines, though usually the balance of scale is tipped near the Pasig River. The resolve is to do the charter change and they will do it themselves. Sneaky, leveled a once famous magistrate, which also means sly and its synonyms. This mindset that has closed the door for the longest time, though not slamming it, on the political dynasty.
So who want to go to the bank laughing all the way? The usual suspects. It’s only the economic provisions that will be touched, says the resolution, not its political parts. One day the key to a house was given to a bunch of thieves on one condition: they will only take what they said they would. One day, Adam and Eve were told they could eat from any tree in the garden except from the tree of life. The original duo ignored the pears on the ground and went for the forbidden one. Guess who led somebody by the leash?
More foreign investors will come into the land to have more access to our natural resources. When people say it’s not about money, according to Murphy’s Law, it is about money and more of it. In the meantime, more Filipinos are voting with their feet to seek the future they deserve, apart from money, abroad. This, despite the lesson in history class that proudly presents the Philippines as the”Pearl of the Orient”. Or better yet lately , as a land that had once a ‘golden age’ when rice was cheap , trees were green and roses were read. It sounds wonderful as a famous Louis Fitzgerald song.
The president ,whose election one year ago has been brought before the Supreme Court, has pledged to bring that past back. Nostalgia has its own limit, and the red onion has rudely made that clear.The present is too far to be urgent while the future is too close not make the most of it before it loses its excitement. Everything, everywhere , all at once.
Art imitates life.
