Tuesday, September 02, 2008 Obenieta: Pain in the neck of power By Myke U. Obenieta So to speak
HANDS down, fighting villains is preferable than parenting. That might explain why most superheroes don’t dare to have kids despite their powers and the cliché of their ability. Like, you know, overcoming the odds with flying colors.
Coming down to earth is easier, on the other hand, with the gravity of having to grin and bear the adventure, blood pressure bursting like fireworks, of raising a child. Which, indeed, takes a village. Or, the vigor of an Incredible Hulk as he heaves a sulk-heavy sigh at the fact that parenthood requires the joint forces of Superman and Wonder Woman. High five, I say regarding my two little boys so frisky about their fantasy with matching costumes (Peter Parker, my eldest calls himself while the youngest believes he is the red-suited stalwart of the Power Rangers).
Easy as well, hand to my heart, (despite our delusions that kids are such bundles of joy flung upon us straight from heaven) to accept the truth of this advertisement seeking the services of a live-in nanny. “My kids are a pain,” states Rebecca Soodak, a painter and a mother of four, whose matter-of-fact ad in Craigslist (a US-based central network of online communities) has been making a buzz in various parenting blogs en route to a recent coverage in the New York Times. So goes Soodak in her ad: “If you cannot multitask, or communicate without being passive aggressive, don’t even bother replying.”
Maybe the mayor of Talisay City might have been tempted to put up a public notice along that line at one time or another while his headline-hogging son Joavan sat like Humpty Dumpty on the crumbling wall of his paternal patience. No doubt the mayor, a convincing Catholic faith defender who can quote the Scriptures as if it were a book of nursery rhymes, must have bitten his lip in the face of this biblical quip: “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased.”
As he runs the risk of a pratfall after the dust of his reckless offspring, adopted or not, it must be a matter of blind faith for his followers to trust that he can stand ramrod straight as a father of their city. After all, even if he feels disarmed with the despair of an amputee, the buck stops where responsibility holds true and steady with a feat worthy of jugglery: To accept or do in one hand what the other does.
Makes me wonder as well what can the mayor of Cebu City, for his part, say about taking care of his constituents?
Especially those who poke their pesky fingers at him even as he scratches his scalp thin for their sake. Can he also “multi-task or communicate without being passive aggressive” on behalf of the urban poor who constitutes the majority in the city. Which, by the way, he so wanted to present to the world as a shining work of his mighty hands.
Conceived to be a refuge for the public who can’t afford the prohibitive cost in private hospitals, the Cebu City Medical Center (CCMC) now echoes with wails, grabbing at his attention that now runs the gamut from being irked to being impatient.
Apparently fed up with the center’s financial troubles, he now wants to throw the baby out the window with the bathwater.
Thus he frets: Let the private sector take care of it, period. Who cares if the CCMC, once privatized, will only offer beds for those who can pay for it?
Feeling orphaned, the urban poor might as well ask: Who can we turn to?
And if the head of City Hall needs further scratching, here’s a simple test even my kid at kindergarten thinks is a no-brainer for sure: With great power comes ________. Fill in the blank, mayor! Or, the only alternative worth trying may be what a distressed mother in New York avers in her ad: “Don’t even bother replying.”
