DOWNRIGHT exciting. Or so I answered a friend’s e-mail, which sounded fidgety as if my family and I were fit to hang upside down from a pole where she must have imagined the American flag limp in the wind like a rag: What’s up over there?

Out here in America, do we feel like all that dreary news—the dollar going down the grave, etc.—is getting us under the skin of Halloween? Peek-a-boo, but us Pinoys—or at least those I know—have long ago steeled our stomachs from watching too much episodes of Regal Shocker. Do we fear and feel uncertain in the shadow of President Bush? Shake and rattle we may, but roll along with the punches we also do.

Come on, didn’t we come from a country where it’s customary to clown around even in the face of crisis? Forget about “cold November in the soul,” all we remember is how well we can throw a party even in the cemetery.

Or, if we can still put up a happy face and gather for a videoke binge every weekend after raising the stake of survival in American pastures, it must be because OFWs always get a sort of astral uplift. Especially from the prayers of Philippine government for us to think always of our families back home and be steadfast with our dollar remittances. After all, that’s how the peso economy floats even if all of Wall Street flounders and flops down deep into the quicksand.

Besides, not all would have the chance to say in hindsight: We were witness to how our vulnerability—that vulture swooping over every migrant’s never-say-die dream—was something shared by many Americans. Something that hits home now that they feel like birds drenched under a downpour, “battered and drifting after eight years of President Bush’s failed leadership,” as a recent New York Times editorial pointed out.

For a while there, every US-based Pinoy with a sigh to spare when talking of home and our heritage of administrative garbage must have found it familiar. Never mind if the editorial’s elegiac litany about “a scarred global image and a government systematically stripped of its ability to protect and help its citizens” referred to the mightiest nation on Earth.

See, it’s not only banana republics that can mess up and make a pile of peels to fall over. Even a great nation like America is not above the reality of humility check.

But even if the chill of autumn is now creeping into winter, and though the air is smoky from the financial meltdown; the heat is still on with the election fever.

Who cares if some of us don’t have the right to vote here yet? No, that doesn’t stop us from getting into the fray over beer as if betting on Barack Obama would render us privy to history in the making of America’s first black president.

Being here in the US right now amid economic uncertainty may be wrong timing. But the worst of times can only be true along with this homespun and simple wisdom: The best is yet to come.

(geemyko@gmail.com)