At last! The noted Pinoy sense of humor has come to the fore, and some people have now gotten to making jokes about the raging pandemic. That is the trait that has saved our people from the most difficult of situations. In Luzon, some wags have coined a new name for the sickness caused by the coronavirus which they have started calling “hiponia”. I wonder, though, why they didn’t call it “Sionia” instead.
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Oh, we who belong to this generation must rely on our sense of humor even when confronted by the most serious conditions. I think that is the trait that has enabled thousands of our “kababayans,” who had migrated to places like Afghanistan and the Taliban country, to keep their wits. And that is how it was easy for American airline companies to fetch their citizens based in that country. And those aircrafts were also able to take out a lot of Filipino and bring them to the United States.
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I wonder, though, what status has been given to them since they are not U.S. citizens in the first place. Will America take them under her wing, or will they be airlifted from there back to the Philippines? If I know my countrymen and women, those airlifted, who may be flown back to their native country, which is the good old Philippines, be grumbling that they should have been left in Afghan territory than return to their native land, which they had figuratively abandoned when they opted to move to Afghanistan.
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Long, long ago I remember that there was a song that has in its lyrics a line saying that “There’s no place like home”. But for our fellow Pinoys who have been flying or sailing out of our country with the hope of finding the so-called “greener pastures” there, I doubt if they still think that way. That, certainly, was not in the minds of those who fly to the U.S. even without the proper documents to enable their legitimate entry. And some of our naughty “kababayans” even adopted a name for their illegal stay and even refer to themselves and their status as “TNT”!
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For those not familiar with the term that, I understand, those involved chose for themselves, TNT in their case, does not mean an explosive, but for the Pinoy expression of “Tago ng Tago”, which describes how they flit from one state to another so their locations will not be discovered by Immigration Officers who will arrest them and ship them back to their own countries later. Oh, several had gotten away with it through, well, we can call them, “devious” means, like by getting married to a relative or someone else they would use to go through a mock ceremony to justify their stay!
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Lately, however, many TNT’s have discovered that America is not really the “Land of Promise” they had imagined it would be. But I know that with the known Pinoy cunning, most of them were able to get away with it. Meanwhile, we are still fortunate in our country because Nature has not been as harsh with it has been with others. Dubai, for instance, is suffering from a drought that has caused rivers, lakes and wells to dry up. Somehow such reports call to mind incidents in the Holy Bible where the Lord punished sinners by depriving them of the gifts of Nature.
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Meanwhile our people are now being distracted by reports concerning the national election even if it is still some time away yet. And it is not secret who are aiming for the highest positions in the land, and among those who believed to have an edge in the process is a woman, Leni Robredo, widow of the man who would have become the president of our country if death had not moved him out of the way. Seems a lot of incumbent officials had been egging Leni Robredo, widow of a very likely winner had an accident not taken him out of the way.
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So now it is anybody’s guess who will be anointed by the existing political parties. From what he has been saying – and doing – it does look that President Duterte really has no intention or desire to seek another term. Many names have been dropped, but there doesn’t seem to be of someone who can easily capture the majority votes. Worst will be the situation if several of them are running. Will we get a leader who is not the choice of a big majority of our voters? Maybe the Church should issue another “Oratio Imperata” for our voters to be enlightened and for our final choice to be the best for our times.*
