EDITORIAL - Let us not lay the butter on too thick

That Manny Pacquiao has become a living folk hero, there is probably little doubt about. That the day of his arrival from the United States, where he beat to a pulp Mexican legend Erik Morales, be declared a national holiday, there is so much to oppose for.

For one, declaring his day of arrival as a national holiday is laying on the butter too thick it can overwhelm the taste of fresh homemade bread. This going too far is a predisposition of the Filipino that ought to be killed and buried. It is doing nobody any good.

When somebody thought of peddling salted peanuts on wheels, everybody followed suit. Now there are more sellers than buyers. The same with lechon manok and fried chicken. With a chicken stall in every corner, business has become tough with the surfeit of competition.

A fad is not actually bad. As a vehicle for social expression, it is a healthy sign of the dynamism of the human race. As opposed to lethargic nuances that sometimes find expression in morbid acts of fatalism, as in teen suicides in other countries, fads are then preferable.

The trouble kicks in when the Filipino fails to make distinctions between a fad and the more dramatic and serious business of charting destinies, as when the nation, in a spontaneous act of asserting freedom, overthrows a dictator.

The overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos should have been a hiccup of socio-political dimension, to be treated as one of its only kind, its rarity finding cause for it to be repaired to forever in reverence and pride.

But no, liking what it did, in much the same way as liking lechon manok, only on a much grander scale, the Filipino began to look at people power as a fad, something to be repeated over and over, ad nauseam.

And so we ousted another sitting president, and then tried to do it again with yet another. To this day we keep on trying. If this sitting president gets ousted, trust that the Filipino will someday once again try to remove in like fashion whoever gets to replace her.

The bottom line is, we do not know a good thing when we see one. We keep overdoing things until they become dirt cheap. So we declare a holiday when Pacquiao arrives? If he wins again, what, we give out bonuses?