MANILA, Philippines—I went to Tacloban City over the weekend for the annual reunion of our high school class.
I am so fortunate to have finished high school in Tacloban, although my school is gone now, thanks, but no thanks to a labor lawyer who’s now a Court of Appeals justice.
My father was assigned in Leyte as assistant provincial commander of the defunct Philippine Constabulary, that’s why I studied in Tacloban, the capital, many years ago.
If I didn’t study in the Eastern Visayas city in my formative years, who knows, I could have turned out a weakling.
The Waray-Waray trait of toughness—as a popular song goes, “Waray-Waray handang matodas (Waray-Waray is ready to die)”—somehow rubbed off on me.
Whenever life deals me a bad card, I stick to the trait I learned from the Warays as an adolescent.
What would life have been like if I had been a weakling?
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Behind the tough Waray exterior is a very generous heart. A Waray invites strangers to his home to partake of food on his table during a fiesta.
I regret having to leave yesterday, the eve of the city’s fiesta, a much-celebrated event in the Tacloban calendar.
But if ordinary Taclobanons are magnanimous, their leaders are petty.
Pettiness is nowhere more evident than in Mayor Alfred Romualdez disallowing the holding of the Pintados, a parade where participants, their faces painted, dance in the streets much like Aklan’s Ati-atihan, last Saturday, three days before the fiesta.
Romualdez did not honor a court order lifting his ban on the holding of the yearly parade.
The parade organizers, however, held the parade anyway in complete disobedience to the mayor’s order.
City policemen, ordered to block the parade, would have clashed with fellow policemen assigned in the province and the regional command who escorted the Pintados revelers, but did not.
Why did the mayor try to prevent the holding of the yearly parade?
Because he had his own parade similar to the Pintados—the “Sangyaw.”
Pintados is sponsored by the provincial governor, Jericho Petilla, whose family is an arch political rival of the Romualdezes.
Politics is supposed to make people magnanimous, but in Tacloban City, it has made a petty tyrant.
The great politician, Daniel Z. Romualdez, once a Speaker of the House of Representatives, a grand-uncle of the mayor’s, must be turning in his grave.
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Some Filipino gays were arrested in Saudi Arabia recently for cross-dressing.
How ironic for that country to hate homosexuals since most of its menfolk are gay who engage in sodomy!
In Saudi, if you are a hairless man or don’t sport a moustache or beard, you could get sodomized.
The Bedouin, the desert people of Saudi, are so depraved they even have sex with their sheep and camels.
I got those tidbits of info from talks I’ve had over the years with Filipinos who worked in Saudi.
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Today is the start of the countdown for the President to step down from power.
That is, if she plans to step down.
On June 30, 2010, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo becomes Citizen Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
Most Filipinos want her out of their lives even before then.
But we just have to bite the bullet in her remaining days in Malacańang.
