WHILE it may not mean anything for some people, sometimes being overly self-righteous and dutiful can rub others the wrong way. Without our meaning to, the aura we put out can sometimes offend or make others uncomfortable, enough for them to shy away, for worse, mold a wrong impression of you, which in the future they could pass on to other people.
Thus, anyone among us could walk around and not know that we have tiny papers stuck with gum at our backs, with such messages as Snob, Crazy, dumbo or something worse.
In lit speak, we can treat them all a joke; the plot thickens.
Trust me, I just wish I had more people to talk to, not just my small fam of three, who also have other things in their minds besides listening to my breakfast what-ifs. That way, I could go at length, rather WE could go at length, and finally talk about how weird it is sometimes, once someone has voiced out (more like blurted out) a particular point of view over something. I have seen it more than a hundred times. Anything starting out innocently and then WHAM, things escalating quickly after that.
For this, an experiment is in order and let our perfect lab rat of choice might as well be politics. As juicy as it is, especially for those who wish to come out as experts at analysis ala-Sherlock, the dissection and discovery of politics in everything or anything, is as much fun as the mild shock that we feel at discovering what is behind the guarded minds and cool demeanor of some people and friends whom we thought we have known all our lives.
As though it were gravy, try pouring politics on anything and voila! Take the recently-concluded Miss Universe (what else?) for example. With social media as our trusty microscope, it had really been quite a thrill to observe how a giant circus tent could miraculously come out of that petri dish. Even hardy politicos and soon-to-be-but-at-present-sadly-remains-an-actor personalities have joined the experiment!
In another dish, the ongoing bombing of the Gaza strip in nth version of the Israel-Palestine centuries-old old conflict, the microscope has become ablaze with biting comments from all sides, even from close friends who, during the old normal had once shared only beer and rum bottles at the table, and never sharp words.
At all these, I sometimes wish that I could scream out, “We are being played!”, but of course, easy as that may seem, the sad truth is I have no evidence. If someone would ask me why I’d do such a thing, I could just mutter in Tagalog, “La lang.” As a matter of fact, I have no evidence for other things as well, like UFOs, Covid conspiracies and the flat earth theory even. To end, I think we all might have regressed a bit, in the sense that in our desperate longing to be heard and understood, we’ve forgotten how to listen.
