ONE man’s joke is another man’s agony.
If jokes could kill, we the Filipinos could all just die… but that will be taken out of context, its meaning placed in a playing field of interpretations for millions to decipher.
When the pen was seen in centuries past to be mightier than the sword, today, social media has taken the lead and can blow up on your face, bringing you to the world wide web of hell.
Nowadays, your Facebook status can turn into a cannon ball, stronger than Miley Cyrus’s wrecking ball combined with Mommy D’s karaoke interpretation.
When social media presents a platform for all to vent and rage, we are caught in between a crossfire of colors which were formerly drab and plain, now symbols of belief and presumed power.
When you just want to watch a basketball game and are subconsciously dictated to take sides, sapping the fun out of harmless game of catch and shoot, a nation rages, condemning the undertones it was projected to connote.
We are free to rage and rant but the signs of the times caution those living in the fear of persecution to candidly take a back seat and haplessly look on while your so called friends take pot shots on each other, bringing the internet fight to personal levels, making prime time soap operas pale in comparison.
My nation now is fixated with a sex tape of a lady who has earned the ire of the colors of the majority, making her the butt of jokes, the bane of many as well as the instant symbol of misogyny.
Allow me to pity the lady, of whom I was not a great fan of, but because of the bandwagon of hate, successfully created the divide in which all of us are caught up in, absorbed and wallowing in.
As the nation continues pour hate unto the cauldron of allegations hurled to the lady of the hour, we mourn the passing of another woman, touted to be an iron lady, laid to rest in a dignified grace with laurels offered on her tomb.
We rue the accolades came too late, when her earthy body chose to rest and free her from the pain of cancer, the nation catapulted her into an icon, a trait not new to the world as we never know what we lost until its gone.
Permit me to remember the Holocaust, the three million Jews who died just because they were themselves and find it hard to laugh at a joke make in stride, not meaning any offense but eliciting hate nevertheless.
Let me commemorate the thousands who have died in the past ninety days, those tagged to be at the bottom of the barrel, caught in a crossfire of a purging and justified to be righteous persecutions the times call for.
I do not condone the acts of unspeakable wrongs they have done, but offer a moment of silence to the passing of order and justice formerly offered to everyone.
We live in the best of times and the worst of times, the joke is now on us, but be cautioned in laughing too hard, someone might find it gruesome.