“Do not look at the heavens through a bamboo reed.” Can this Japanese proverb help us sift through the May 13 elections’ mixed bag? Nobody loses an election here. Those trashed insist they were cheated.
The catholic bishops of Bacolod and Lipa were shell-shocked by the election results. Earlier, they listed the candidates who supported the reproductive health bill under “Team Patay.” Through ads and sample ballots, they urged repudiation.
“Ah, the chill of consciousness returns,” the poetic drunk Uncle Seamus would groan after a bender the night before. Morning after the May 13 elections, what do we wake up to?
“People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war—or before an election.” Otto von Bismarck’s adage unreels with a vengeance in the homestretch of the May 13 elections.
“Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see ghosts floating between the lines.” Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen’s remark came to mind on reading reports that former Senior Supt. Cezar Mancao scrammed from his NBI cell. How? By “using his own key.”
Contrast is a compelling tutor. Compare the track records of talks for peace by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the Communist Party of the Philippines. Both were intractable insurgencies.
“You can’t dull hunger by painting rice cakes,” says an Asian proverb. It explains the controversy sparked by the National Statistical Coordination Board’s latest poverty data.
“Hopes for calmer times under this year’s new management?” The Economist earlier tacked that keep-your-fingers-crossed title on a “leader” for a 2013 Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit. Were those “hopes” partly achieved Wednesday and Thursday in Brunei?
As the May 13 elections campaign careens into homestretch, many candidates get strident. There are 18,053 posts up for grabs—almost quadruple of that is the number of office seekers.
In just over a month, after a surprise election in 28 hours to the Chair of Peter, Pope Francis jolted people with initial reforms. These were mainly by example. Are we in for more surprises?
Suddenly, it is twilight. A stoop matches our gray hair and bifocals. They say we’re the elderly folk we used to zip past unheeding. Where did those years go?
That’s shorthand for daily 30-minute “time-outs” that the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority authorized Monday. Blistered by the sun, traffic cops and street sweepers may dash for the shade in shifts.
