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Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Obenieta: Up, up and awry
By Myke U. Obenieta
So to Speak
Overheard in the aftermath of the Wowowee tragedy, while post-trauma talk whirls around the silence of the stampede victims, is this tongue-in-cheek wisecrack: “May pa tong nangamatay, impas tanang problema.”
With troubles turned to dust, who needs prospects of instant wealth anymore? Awful, but only someone with a gothic sense of goodwill would wish eternal rest for those raring to find the rainbow’s end and its purported pot of gold beyond a game show’s gate.
Better off, the dead. That sounds likely when the living seem out of orbit, buoyed by the clouds in their heads. Where the facts that face us all, whether we like it or not — the pretty boring reality of poverty — wear the mask of a clown seriously miming hope as a trick up his sleeve. Where nothing is more disaster-prone than the aerodynamics of dreams.
See the Sarimanok-styled station as it ostensibly let fly of hope higher than it can fancy, so as to avoid ruffling its feathers with the cold blow of a thrashing in the one-upmanship for the ratings. And how it seems heading to an all-time low even as its bigwigs wish they had the power of the Phoenix.
See the prospects of an anniversary day of merry-making turned into a nightmare and a long spell of mourning.
See luck as it now sprouts root down the graveyard muck.
Pollyanna’s rose-tinted spectacles are fine, but are you sure you also know how to roll your eyeballs?
Upbeat prospects — rendering it breezy to overlook the pitfalls — can be fatal, after all. Didn’t we know or remember Icarus?
The best is yet to come, true. But implicit in that forward-looking stance is a steadfast awareness for survival lessons no more basic than this: To brace for the unexpected is to expect the worst.
Certainly, we wouldn’t have our tails between our legs if we knew the monkey wrench can be thrown to the best-laid plots of mice and men.
Which ought to compel us why contingency measures are not something just pulled out of thin air. And sizing it up also means seizing the possibilities of the otherwise, of things turning awry once we fail to knock on our wooden heads. Something ABS-CBN’s bigwigs and its spawn of big dreamers, sad to say, lost sight of.
But it’s too late for the blame game and for finding fault after the facts crush our noses down the grit of reality check. That’s the least the dead and the haunted need.
Suckers for sweetness and other things too good to be true, we are always in dire need for a bitter pill to swallow.
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (February 7, 2006 issue)
Write letter to the editor.Click here.
Join the Sun.Star message board.Click here.
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