There’s a line from the movie All About Eve where Bette Davis’s character, Margo Channing — an aging stage actress — tells her dinner party guests, “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.” That line automatically comes to mind when I think about our current predicament, as we try to stay afloat and drift with the current amid the ongoing Middle East crisis.
In hindsight, the whole situation appears to have come straight out of a badly written script. Just look at the key players.
One is a parody, flip-flopping several times a day with no sign of undergoing any significant transformation. With him, you never know exactly what is going on, except for one thing: anything that comes out of his mouth should be taken with a grain of salt. For all intents and purposes, he has made a caricature of himself.
The other has become the epitome of evil, playing the victim despite having killed thousands in Gaza without batting an eyelash. Unfortunately for him and his country, the rest of the world has caught on. And the collective guilt that was globally imposed after the tragic events of the Holocaust in the Second World War is beginning to erode.
And then there’s the victim. Vilified since 1979, it has withstood an invasion, an eight-year bloody war, and being bombed to smithereens. Its leaders and scientists have been assassinated purely for existing, and yet the regime continues to stand its ground.
To say that its ride has been bumpy since deposing the Western-propped shah would be an understatement. For its people, resilience is not a choice but a matter of survival.
The same can be said of what Filipinos have gone through these past few years, although our enemy is not some idiot obsessed with power but something existential: our own selves and Mother Nature, whose brute force doesn’t distinguish between the pious and the perfidious.
And now we are facing another kind of threat. One that is not of our own making. Some quarters are trying to take advantage and pin the blame on the sitting administration, which — even though I did not vote for it in the last elections — has been doing a decent job of keeping things together.
Recently, I have come across posts from doomsayers on social media warning about looming food shortages and power outages. And while I admit that it’s better to be prepared than to be caught empty-handed, I refuse to fall victim to mass hysteria.
Call me a hopeless optimist. While some quarters might dread a paralyzed transport sector, I imagine the bottle of rum waiting for me at home. Others might conjure up nightmarish visions of empty shelves at the grocery or even fathom runaway inflation that will render the peso useless, but I still imagine the bottle of rum waiting for me at home.
Of course, I’m trying to make light of things. Because, let’s face it, there’s really nothing we can do except maybe hope and pray that the actors in this war drama will come to their senses and put an end to this carnage.