AND now, for something completely different.
That means I’ll be shying away from topics like the bombings at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Jolo, Sulu last Sunday, Jan. 27, which claimed the lives of several civilians and soldiers as well as injured countless others.
Because, God forbid, the same thing happens here in our midst.
That also means I won’t be discussing the sense of despair that officials of the southern town of San Fernando must be feeling with their colleagues dropping dead like flies, felled by bullets of still unidentified assassins.
Nor will I revisit the troubles that plague the Davao City Environmental Care Inc. after medical wastes that the firm was supposed to treat and dispose of were found dumped along the Butuanon River or floating in the Mactan Channel or washed up on the shores of the cities of Mandaue and Lapu-Lapu.
Instead, I’ll be talking about the Philippines’ recent victory in the Miss Interncontinental beauty pageant, which was held in Manila over the weekend.
You see, not only was it the first for the country, but our winning candidate Karen Gallman is another Filipino-Australian beauty.
To those who still don’t know, last December’s Miss Universe winner, Miss Philippines’ Catriona Gray, is also an Aussie.
According to her Facebook page, Gallman was born in Bohol, but her family migrated to Brisbane, Australia when she was very young. She returned to the country to finish high school in Parañaque, but she went to college and graduated with a degree in business management at the Queensland University in Australia.
Gallman also worked as an operations analyst in London, England. An avid traveler, she has been to 30 countries.
A typical Filipino upbringing it definitely is not.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure Gallman and Gray are deserving of their titles. However, they’re not exactly the women you see on the streets going about their daily business. Yet, the country’s beauty pageant organizers are telling the whole world and the Filipino public that they are.
And that’s my problem. They’re supposed to represent us, but they don’t look like the rest of us. They didn’t even spend their whole lives on our shores. They well could have represented their father’s country if they thought they had a better chance of winning there.
But hey, I’m glad these women have embraced their “Filipinaness.”
I’m just worried that maybe we’re sending the wrong message to our youth. That the country’s beauty pageant organizers have created a standard of beauty that is unattainable for the majority, which makes almost all of us, I guess, ugly.