OUR world stopped last Monday as we watched Miss Universe on the tube.
While the beauties in svelte figures mouth words of empowering women, children, people suffering from poverty and disease, these things happened.
Here in the country, twenty-eight women and girls get raped in a day. 4,018 Filipinos leave the country in a day to work abroad. 46 women political prisoners await their freedom.
One out of 10 or four million children are out of school. Around 60 to 70 kids out of 1,000 drop out of school every year.
25 people get infected with Human Immunodeficiency Virus in a single day, or one every hour, making this a “youth epidemic.”
While Miss France talked about accepting refugees, in a single day in Syria, around 100 to 1,000 Syrians flee their country, risking their lives on borders and on the seas, to find a safe haven from the daily bombings.
Miss USA is an army reservist, and is black. Back in her country, her president is building a wall against Muslims, building pipelines across indigenous lands, adding fire to greed, racism, and misogyny.
Candidates talked about empowering women, how much do these words matter in a world ruled by men, sometimes misogynist, capitalist.
We cringe on how our Miss Philippines can only talk about the most significant change in the world in the past ten years was coming together in this country for the Miss Universe.
It doesn't matter what language she should have used. English, Filipino or whatever language, what matters is what was in her head.
And that reflects what happened to the young people in the past ten years.
The most significant change for them is social media. Whether this change is good or bad, it depends. Between social issues and selfies, rants, misfires and misuse of words, you know where the youth is much occupied with.
Sadly too, in the past ten years, our school system has been more flawed. With as much as 1,000 errors in grade school textbooks, no wonder children cannot tell who is a lumad or a Moro or who Marcos was.
In ten years, the significant change was climate change, and the challenge t how we should adapt and fight the causes of climate change. But we wonder if this was taught in schools, or acted upon by our leaders.
So much rants over a beauty pageant. This is not a brain contest. But sadly, that is how we are so occupied with. As if beauty can save the world.
My friend Jennifer Estellore in Australia noted that in Australia, people were busy on Facebook registering their March in March event to rally for the protection of their rights. They don't care about beauty pageants.
In a parallel time, you can be a beauty queen, a feminist, political prisoner, and a patriot like the late Maita Gomez.
We still do have women of substance, such as a Monique Wilson, artist and global director of One Billion Rising to stop gender violence.
We need to snap out of this thing of changing the world with a smile. Time to tune out.
tyvelez@gmail.com