“Such is the aberrant character of many among us, who butter-up to the rich and famous when they are up, yet derisively laugh when ordinary folk slip on pavements, instead of helping them”
What a week that was!
First, there was the well-delivered SONA by our president whose first sentences described with absolute truth the real state of our nation.
A nation whose economic managers keep touting our GDP growth figures which have barely recovered from the recession caused by the pandemic, yet unleashed an inflation backlash that deepened poverty thereby increasing the disparity between the few rich and the teeming poor.
I recall one of GMA’s SONA-tas where she described the country as being of two worlds, divided between the rich and the poor. Sadly, neither she nor her successors in high office managed to decisively narrow that great divide.
Even more tragic for the benighted land is that most of those who applauded the current leadership lustily last Monday are the ones responsible for this real state of the nation.
Heaven proved it on Wednesday when it poured torrents upon the nation’s capital and the rest of Luzon, when great floods engulfed the hovels of the poorest, destroyed the few saved possessions of the middle class, while the rich in their exclusive villages were hardly annoyed as they watched Netflix while sipping imported wines, fruits and cheeses.
Such that the 5,500 completed flood control projects our president boasted in his SONA suddenly fell flat because most of these were, as usual, shabbily built by contractors who had to cough huge commissions to government officials, including the biggest crocodiles of all who have made the once “august” chambers of our legislature their denizen.
More than 60 of these contractors are now “solons,” a mockery of the descriptive name reserved for the wise, transformed into “wa-is” only in da Pilipins.
While the metropolis and other provinces were drowning in floods, security cameras of the airport caught the vice president, the long-suffering Inday Sara, leaving for Dubai on her way to Munich along with her half-German mother, her husband and their three young children.
Fed to media, a clear hatchet job by her envious political enemies, the picture sent her detractors into paroxysms of gleeful denunciation at her supposed “insensitivity” amidst national calamity.
Never mind that a trip to far-away lands is something you plan way ahead of departure, where you have to get Schengen visas for brood ahead of time; apply for a personal leave from Malacanang (which she got on July 9, two weeks before her very early Wednesday morning flight); book your places of stay and other arrangements.
That is something surely not lost to the congressmen who take every opportunity to travel abroad.
Neither did anyone, most especially the commentators and political analysts of “pinklawan” stripes, even compare the 27 trips in 22 months of our president, F-1 spectacles included, during which times the vice president dutifully stayed in the country as “designated” caretaker.
How sadistic these pundits have become, kicking someone from the boondocks of Mindanao when she has become officially “passe,” down and out, despite fortifying a once hailed “Uniteam” and now left with the powerless title of being Constitutional successor, but only “if and when.”
Again, such is the aberrant character of many among us, who butter-up to the rich and famous when they are up, yet derisively laugh when ordinary folk slip on pavements, instead of helping them.
But the tragic events were at least temporarily forgotten as many were assuaged by the hope some of our athletes would capture a gold or two, maybe even three at the Paris Olympiad which unveiled in unprecedented manner early Saturday morning, local time.
From the comfort of our homes, we watched the open air rites that started the 33rd Olympiad along the Seine, where our athletes joined hundreds of other representatives of their countries as they glided in bateaus of various sizes from Ile de la Cite to Le Tour Eiffel.
Interspersed along the parade “sous le ponts de Paris” were outstanding dance and musical performances from classical to pop to rock that featured Lady Gaga at the start and the inimitable Celine Dion singing “Hyme a l’amour” at the end, while a “son et lumiere” spectacle lighted Paris skies, and the Olympic cauldron lit by the fabled torch brought from Greece to Marseilles and thence to Paris by so many athletic greats from different nations, floating gracefully on a hot air balloon.
Spending much less, the French creatively fashioned opening rites more memorable than the Beijing 2008 extravaganza that we thought was unbeatable when we watched it then.
Trust French creativity to come up with “Vive la Difference”!
