Friday, March 23, 2007 Yap: Trapocide By Januar E. Yap Meanwhile
IT MIGHT have been the same decades ago. In school, we burst out in fiery debates about Marcos and returned to pick our sticks and play pool.
We cared, of course. I had my eyes set on the absent digits on then senator Jovito Salonga’s raised fist as he proclaimed victory in that “historic session” of the Senate that booted out the American military bases.
He lost some of his fingers in the Plaza Miranda bombing a bit before we were born, I whispered to my classmate, awed by the senator’s hands. Ahh, he replied. But one of those was due to an old school sanction for being a leftee. The poor coed took my word for it.
I can’t say if, in between bouts of Ragnarok, my students today will seriously talk about this serial and historical snakes-and-ladder game we call the Philippines. Things have changed; the universe needs to be rearranged.
My dean writes a paper about changing the way we teach in postmodern times. I agree. The classrooms need a bit of rock and roll, some out-of-the-box chilling out to make these kids see that their epic strategy games are nothing but pixelized rehashes of the real world.
Easy, a naughty co-ed says, and explains. These trapos are hypertensive, with high glucose level and ominous gout. They involuntarily skip cardiac beats as casually as they leap through bureaucratic squares and grant contracts to like-minded frogs that bloat like fiscal budgets.
So what do you propose? “Well,” he shifts into a baritone, “let’s dispatch an undercover army of phony dietitians and feed these trapos all the grub that’ll finish them off.”
This was when I proposed the special and highly delectable “pork shake.” The kid became suspicious. Well, it’s this bundle of feast whose fats tremble to a grand “twist and shout” when you shake it on the platter. It’s a single-dose killer if you want to end traditional politics on this side of the earth.
Seriously, a good friend of mine is now reading Malcolm Gladwell’s “Tipping Point.” It’s this one book that doesn’t believe the making of a revolution is incremental. All you need, it says, are a handful of variables to trigger what in epidemiology is called a “tipping point,” where everything just have to shoot up to the peak.
Right on deadline, my good friend will walk all his way to the Comelec office to file his COC. He will walk all his way to changing the way things are in his town, held for so long by a singular entity who had kept the townsfolk in the dark ages.
He has all the variables towards making his own “tipping point”: a clever campaign jingle, the stickiness of the message of change, women, children, an untapped but dense sector of laborers who work in the city’s constructions. The latter, he says, is a sector that needs the support of the government; they’re the forgotten heroes of the towns. And guess what, it’s true.
I’m suspicious of activists who think they alone can save this country from the dogs. “The revolution,” I told a student, “will outlive you.” It’s enough that you contribute something positive for the country in your own modest way, you can’t be an overnight messiah.
My friend, on the other hand, knows where he is. Like this country, he’s in the middle of a work in progress.
