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Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Obenieta: Would you believe?
By Myke U. Obenieta
So to Speak
What’s true, or so we’ve been warned, can be stranger than fiction. When a dwarf stomps on a giant’s bunion, that’s not entirely as over-the-top as a tabloid tale scaling down the human condition to the size of a dot of an exclamation point. To read is to roll the eyeballs off its sockets. More so if you’re a sucker for what’s happening, no matter how heavy-handed.
So if there’s a skill we ought to get the hang of, it’s gotta be suspension of disbelief. Yes, so as not to be undermined by the unexpected.
Even the mighty are not spared from pratfalling over their slippery foothold of the factual. Look how the President might as well bury her head in the sand in the face of her faux pas regarding a baseless report on the “death” of a leading terrorist. Maybe her informers would be better off churning out escapist paperbacks to keep their pot boiling.
To see her so gullible is to believe in her foes’ fondness for stressing her weakness. It, indeed, stretches the imagination, while what remains of our faith in her is bursting at the seams, to hang on to a threadbare belief in her power to govern.
Go figure, isn’t this all a piece of or a variation on a theme of our vulnerabilities smack in this weather of our bewilderment? How we wished our certainties, our comfort zones and bedrocks of safety, did not have the consistency of a quicksand.
Lately, the reports could have been grist for a skeptic’s mill.
If an armed robber can make a money transfer agent whimper “within view” of the Fuente Police Station, as reported yesterday, get a grip: Anything goes anywhere.
Lest you forget, a conflagration in Barangay Pahina Central last Saturday night broke out even if the Cebu City Fire Department was just a scream away.
Last we frowned over the headlines, something as harmless as birds, on the wings of a viral outbreak, could sweep us off our footholds six feet under.
We are not safe, or so these stories tell us. Which makes us wish there was another truth easier to believe. Like: Dependability becomes the powerful. The Reformed Value-Added Tax will do us a lot of good. Terrorism, political strife and poverty will be passé. Et cetera, et cetera.
Soon, hopefully, faith is easier to swallow than fiction.
(November 8, 2005 issue)
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