You can tell the level of public disgust by the amount of jokes circulating about the person, institution or issue. The joking went on overdrive at the height of the onion crisis, and then when the flood control scandal erupted.
Today the jokes give us a break from all the bad news emanating from the national disaster that is the Senate.
Over the weekend, a favorite joke was that someone had finally been captured. Not MIA Sen. Ronald dela Rosa, but the tailor of Senate President Alan Peter Cayetano. The tailor has been charged with committing a crime of fashion.
It’s no joke though that there are senators who seem to think all Pinoys are comprehension-challenged. The lies and drama they are foisting on their employers – we the taxpayers – insult the intelligence.
Maybe it’s a force of habit among those who are borne to power on the back of widespread poverty and low literacy.
And for all the hilarious memes about “rolling stone” Senator Bato, he could have the last laugh, if the rumors are true that he has already left the country by private yacht like Alice Guo.
We’re being taken for fools. We should start singing Jamaican reggae superstar Bob Marley’s take on a famous quote: “You can fool some people sometimes, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”
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There must be a correlation between the ease of fooling people and the quality of education, and the deterioration in Filipinos’ reading comprehension.
I thought about this as I went over the belongings my mother left behind. I came across piles of letters and greeting cards – stuff she wrote and sent to us, and those she received from us and her relatives who had settled in the US.
There were also shoeboxes filled with letters and cards that I received since my high school days until I started working and several of my friends relocated to the US, from where they continued our regular correspondence.
I had asked my mom to get rid of the old letters because I was worried that the shoeboxes, forgotten in the dark corners of the house, might be turned into rodent (or worse, snake) lairs.
But my mom kept everything. The shoeboxes were dusty but didn’t draw any mites or cockroaches. The letters were mostly well-preserved, along with a mountain of photographs, all neatly stacked and marked, from my mom’s high school days until phone cameras came along and everything was stored digitally.
What struck me in the letters – all in cursive – was how well-written they were, whether in English or Filipino. And whether from my mom, my other family members and friends, all the letters featured good penmanship. They were grammatically flawless, with hardly any erasures, and the ideas and depth of the storytelling made reading them so delightful.
And how long the letters are – even those from my male friends from my teenage years in Manila.
We’re all middle class (not even upper-middle income) and none of us went to expensive exclusive schools. Yet the letters show that in those days, ordinary Filipinos had no problem with reading comprehension.
This may be partly because in those days, people spent a lot of time reading, allowing the mind to process words and ideas and nurturing critical thinking, rather than just scrolling through digital images.
Even reading illustrated comics was educational. I learned formal Filipino (it was called Tagalog back then) from reading Pinoy komiks, and improved my English proficiency with some help from Mad Magazine and the Marvel superhero comic books. I got through Shakespeare in college English by reading the comic book versions.
People took time to arrange their thoughts before writing them down, mostly in longhand, and occasionally typewritten. The pace of using your hand to write down your thoughts is probably in sync with the pace of processing ideas.
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I’ve been told that these days, there are Millennials and even Gen Zs who are reviving handwritten correspondence, even as they continue short messaging and emoji exchanges.
Reacting to comments by a Boomer, a Gen Z journalist confirmed recently that he and his friends genuinely like getting messages written in Hallmark cards (yes, they’re still around), especially in romantic matters. He said the recipients keep the greeting cards.
I continue to receive letters from people from older generations, and the letters are just as well-written as my mom’s – in terms of penmanship, grammar and the presentation of ideas.
They belong to a generation that grew up when the Philippines was a favored education hub in Asia. In those days, the public school system produced top graduates while problem students were sent to private schools to be disciplined.
These days the messages I receive from ordinary people, whether in digital form or handwritten, are often so atrociously written. Effective communication has become a luxury for the millions of Filipinos who can’t afford quality education in the top private schools.
In too many areas, universal free education from kiddie school to college has meant mediocre, puwede na education. The government seems to think that since the education is free, it doesn’t need quality.
The importance of education also tends to be lost in a society where the only requirements for becoming a senator cover age, natural Philippine citizenship, residency, voter registration and the ability “to read and write.” The Constitution doesn’t even specify any level of reading and writing competency.
Any populist buffoon meeting those minimum requirements, who can read and write his/her name, can therefore be a senator.
There are senators who package themselves as champions of motherhood causes – the environment, health, the arts – but come crunch time, personal and family fortunes always trump national interest.
You can’t blame such a senator for treating Filipinos like fools. After all, they voted for the senator.