That viral picture

It’s too bad that we don’t have space on this page for cartoons, because I would have asked for one to illustrate this piece for this week. Imagine this: a scene at the NAIA baggage claim area on a busy day, with throngs of passengers crowded around the carousel, waiting for their luggage. Behind the yellow line stands a slim senior lady in a simple black outfit, holding on to a cart, chatting casually with her companion. Across them, let’s show two other passengers, both watching the woman intently. The elderly man has this thought bubble: “Oh, wow, that’s Mrs. Billionaire CEO, waiting for her luggage.” The grim-faced young woman beside him is thinking: “Heartless capitalist! Too cheap to even pay a porter!”

Now how and why did image cross my mind?

Last week, a picture I took of that same scene and which I (perhaps stupidly) posted on Facebook went viral. If I got a peso for every time that image was liked and reposted, I could get myself a new iPhone 16. But what really surprised me wasn’t the velocity with which my post went out there, but how sharply it divided the people who responded to it and the intensity – sometimes the vehemence – with which they expressed their thoughts. Maybe I should’ve expected that, knowing how social media works. As psychologists will tell us, the same picture can mean very different things to different people.

Most responses – especially the initial ones – were positive, and praised the subject for her “just-like-us” simplicity and humility. I saw a lot of messages attesting to this being her usual behavior, harking back to her family’s rise from modest and hardworking origins to their present prominence and affluence. Sure, some of the praise may have been effusive, but it was consistent and anecdotal, drawn from personal knowledge of and encounters with the lady (whom, I have to say, I’ve never formally met, although I interviewed her briefly once on Zoom for a book project).

And then, perhaps inevitably, the backlash came. Someone accused me of being a stalker and a marites, of invading a celebrity’s privacy. And what was the big deal, someone else said, when we all have to wait for our luggage? In other places like Scandinavia, even prime ministers carry their own bags. Why praise a billionaire for doing what the rest of us do? Why get starstruck by the rich and powerful?

That puzzled me, because I thought that was the whole point. The rich are not like you and me, as Fitzgerald said: they have others do their menial chores for them. (When was the last time you saw a senator or a CEO pick up his or her own bags?) This is the Philippines, not Scandinavia, where entitlement is king; the lady’s noteworthiness comes not from her being one of us, but her being one of them doing something like one of us.

It went on from there to a dissection of the lady’s family fortune and how it was allegedly fattened by the blood and sweat of underpaid contractual workers, particularly at her family’s department store chain. “You’re blind to capitalist exploitation!” someone screamed. (I was aware of the labor issues, which have yet to be fully resolved, but all I decided to reply was, “If you say so.” I was blind because it wasn’t what I saw at that moment or was looking for.) “How many UP students have been truncheoned by the police because they marched with that company’s striking employees?” another asked. (I honestly don’t know, but UP being UP, it would have been quite a few. “How many UP students shop at that department store?” I had to ask back. I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t admit to being a suki of that store and a holder of its card; I can’t afford upscale boutiques.) And so on.

I could’ve been snarkier in my retorts, but what for? I’m a quiet and largely benign (I think) presence on Facebook, a platform I eschewed for the longest time before finally giving in a few years ago, out of the need for its marketplace (yes, I was looking for things, not people, which probably tells you something). Since then, despite my natural tendency to stay away from what the Desiderata calls “loud and aggressive persons… vexatious to the spirit,” I’ve run into a good number of them – some even happen to be my friends with good reason to be loud and aggressive over causes they feel passionate about. When you get into social media, that comes with the territory. But at my age, I have to pick my fights, no longer having the kind of moral stoutness that can comprehensively and intensely feel outrage at every instance of perceived injustice; I keep trying to do right, but am happy for small graces in an unkind world.

Much of this goes to how we view the rich from our middle-class perches. There’s a part of us that suspects that all that wealth has to be the fruit of evil, with so many exemplars around to prove it, and another part that yearns for all that ease and comfort (or the lifestyle and the luxury, for the younger set). Having dealt with a number of them because of my work, I’ve come to see the rich and famous as characters in stories with surprisingly unsurprising and fairly predictable arcs, so I’m gratified when now and then I come across an interesting deviation.

Historians, journalists and critics will exhaust the complexity of the big picture; they like landscapes. My inner fictionist responds to telling moments in isolation; I draw portraits. To write good stories, we script the unscripted. I often say at lectures that characters become most interesting when they go out of character – when they do something that they were never expected to do, whether good or bad, but which had always been in them in wait for the right confluence of conditions to emerge. I challenge my students to bring their characters out of their usual context to reveal more of their true selves: don’t show a priest in church, but bring him to a fish market, or a construction site (or even a girlie bar, but Somerset Maugham already did that, sort of, in “Rain”).

Social media is a huge lens that hyper-magnifies everything – virtue and vice alike. It’s also a mirror that ultimately tells us that what we see (or decide to see) is who and what we are. My little experiment with a picture that went viral just showed us how.

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Email me at [email protected] and visit my blog at www.penmanila.ph.