Hard to be green

Last Saturday I woke up with a pain in my throat and an I-should-have-known feeling. Two weeks before I worked with people with the flu. It was my turn to get it now. I hopped into my car to go to the supermarket, passed a drugstore by accident, saw a bottle of Vicks Formula 44 and was swept away by nostalgia. I used to drink that when I was small. I bought myself a big bottle out of sentiment. It’s a good thing I did. That afternoon, after everything had quieted down, I got the chills. I got fever, pretty high, and I was coughing so badly I drank the Vicks Formula 44. It really helped.

I had forgotten my cell phone in the car the night before. My driver brought it to me at around 9 a.m. on Saturday and it had 38 unread messages. That was the day I wrote my column “It’s Easy to be Green.” The telephone didn’t stop all day and all night. I had hundreds of messages, most of which I could not answer because — you guessed it — I had the flu. I even turned off my cell phone to silence it so I could get some rest because I was so sick. Try to imagine this — I am sick and I live alone. There’s no one around to give me medicine or to feed me.   I have to go and get everything myself but that’s okay. I just woke up, coughed, hacked, mumbled, drank and went back to sleep. This went on through Sunday. I opened my cell phone and it would not stop beeping.

Now, a week late, I apologize to all of you who texted and did not get a reply. I was too sick to do it. I am profoundly sorry.

Then Monday came and I was still weak, dizzy when I got up, coughing like a maniac. I knew I could not go out and vote. Instead I watched the TV coverage on and off until Monday night when I began to see the trend. Noynoy was winning. He got the most votes and that really depressed me. What kind of people are we not to see his true colors? Even more depressing was that Erap was in second place, then Villar, then Gibo. For vice president, Binay was number one, outdoing my Mar Roxas. Huh? I wonder how they will get along? Noynoy as president and Binay, much older, much wiser, much more successful, with a lot more street smarts, as vice president. But I went to bed still wishing for the best.

On Tuesday morning the trend was still the same. I received this text: “It seems to me Filipinos still don’t know whom to vote for. Obviously elections are popularity contests. Too sad.” Maybe, I responded, but should we just give up? “I really like Gibo. My second choice is Gordon but never Aquino nor Erap. Tama na sila.” My opinions exactly.

Another person sent me interesting text calling the election a “mockery.” I disagreed with him. Mockery means words or behavior intended to make something or somebody look silly or ridiculous or something that is ridiculously inadequate or wholly unsuccessful. He could not have been implying that Noynoy would make a mockery of the presidency but no, he meant the elections mocked the people who truly believed that Gibo would have made the ideal president. I disagreed. I said I thought the elections were reality. They showed us — the more intelligent people in the country — how small a sliver we were. That is normal. In any country, anywhere in the world, the intelligent slice is smaller than the average slice. But we should not give up. What it means is that we should exert more effort to educate the less educated so they can see our point and stop voting out of their compassionate sides — that poor boy lost his mother, let’s make him president — or out of their idolatry, which explains why Erap made it still to second place. He was voted in by people who still idolized him as the macho man in his very old movies.

I’m sorry, but the election results depress me, too. I hoped against all hope that Gibo would come in as the dark horse galloping up out of the darkness and bringing our country finally into the light. But apparently it is not yet time. We are still probably being taught our lessons. I will not write about politics again for a little while because it always gets me down. Instead I will watch the war between Noynoy and Binay quietly. Will it be a David and Goliath all over again with David played by Binay?  A size match. I think it might be. Who would have thought Binay would win? 

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