When human aspirations are left alone

One recalls with alacrity Jerry Tundag’s “To the Quick” on the unexpected loss of the Philippine bet this year, Pamela Bianca Manalo, in the “Miss Universe” pageant. Miss Manalo is not an “ugly duckling” or a dunce in articulation, for failing to land the top plum, or even making the top 15 cut. It’s just that the keen competition made every candidate a potential winner among the beauteous and brainy elite.

That Miss Manalo had been “dropped like a hot potato” is a cutting but fitting metaphor, viewed from the “rapacious (as in covetous or voracious) build-up of expectations that the Philippine media… spun around Manalo” some two weeks to the pageant finals.

It's dicey to the less initiated to the usual tv fare in drumming up interest over promo ops… The glossy spiel on the “assets” of the Philippine bet was overly exuberant as to convince any doubting Thomas that the beauty tiara was a cinch for Pamela.

Cocksure propensity about future events, as if gifted with clairvoyance to know what is not yet palpable, is a typical Filipino vice. With crystal ball cockiness of the Delphian oracles, man imperfect often gets burned by bad tidings that herald the disappointing wet blanket of reality. That’s a bane to one’s sensibility, stunned by the saying not to count the chicks before the eggs are hatched.

But the more amusing mind set of old village folk has to do with fate, superstition, and some unique religious beliefs. The simple farming “sabongero” and tillers of the good earth faithfully observe customs and traditions learned from their forebears as simple “truths” of life. One such “truth” is that whatever happens, there’s Somebody up there who wills it, they be good tidings on health, or good harvest, which man must pray for, or the opposite.

For instance, the homegrown fighting cock may be pitted at the “tigbakay” only when certain “regla” be observed, like, reading the cock's “hingbis” or its feathers in relation to the lunar cycle, or the eerie behavior of the cock, say, its neck lying plomb on the floor or “binitin”. Above all, there’s always the hopeful prayers, as in, “hinaut unta nga buligan sa Ginoo”.

There are people still faithful to the old practices - “ang naandan”, they call it - in tilling the soil, planting, and harvesting. During droughts, they fervently pray for rain. In planting the “kamote” vine in ringlets, there’s that customary “palihi” ritual during evanescent twilight or before daybreak by a maiden who lays the ringlet into the soil and muttering: “maayo unta nga mangunod sama niini”, simultaneously shoving the soil over the vine with her bare breasts. Or, the farmer planting “kamoteng kahoy” stems while fully naked covering them with soil as he also mutters: “hinaut nga mangunod ingon ini”, with his knuckled knees.

The ritual has superstition tinged with atavistic or even barbaric long, long, ago primitivism. But the reality is that among these simple old folk and carried over to their young, there seems no difference in their superstitious practices and their inseparable religious beliefs.

They always invoke the intercession of God, such as, “Ang Ginoo ray magbuot”, or “Hinaut untang kaloy-an sa Diyos”. They wisely muse: “Dili man ta Ginoo nga makagagahom ug manggialamon”, i.e., man isn’t God who is omnipotent and omniscient.

Was it Nathaniel Hawthorne, or another writer, who warned man not to assume as a know-all and over-powerful? Regardless of varying beliefs, the unifying creed is, there’s the Creator of man and the universe. And man must always be humbly prudent to invoke His blessings.

Thus, even to the most naïve “baryohanon”, Pamela Bianca Manalo’s failure to win as “Miss Universe” crystallizes the bucolic philosophy that human aspirations and ambitions have to be anchored on God's will. She was just a victim of the over-confident TV-hype that assumed infinite omniscience carelessly resulting in her unlucky rejection as in “nasuhong”, or jinxed.

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