“When will we ever have a fair sun that will slay the darkness that envelops us all?”
BY THE time this article sees print, I shall be far away from the motherland, ironically on our National Day.
I won’t be able to watch the live telecast of the Senate debate on whether or not to proceed with the impeachment trial and all that hullabaloo.
The outcome of this “gripping” issue that has everyone but the “masa” out-opinionating each other, will impact on 2028, or so the ringleaders of both sides believe. Still, all the so-called frontrunners for the presidency three years hence give me little comfort about the future of the benighted land. For now, it makes me thankful that I am miles and miles away.
Yesterday, the son of a close friend and compadre got married in an idyllic setting in the Tuscan countryside, far from the madding crowd that is the Philippines.
The English author Thomas Hardy contrasted the idyll of rural life against the harsh realities of everyday life in his late 19th century novel titled “Far from the Madding Crowd.”
Another Thomas, this time surnamed Gray, wrote in his famous “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” about the “madding crowd’s ignoble strife” where people buried in the churchyard are free from the frenzy of dreadful existence.
Ours is a country caught in the frenzy of ignoble strife, on a Senate which is minded to thrash the impeachment complaint sent by the HoR without trying its object, and those who hope to entomb the object’s political future via a prolonged telenovela that would steal the light from whatever legislation the people need to ease the tribulations of daily life.
How government will repay the principal and interest on our humongous P16.8 trillion debt is more worrisome for this writer than whether a spare tire named Inday Sara remains a spare or not.
For 2025, the debt service program will reach P2.05 trillion consisting of P1.2 trillion in principal and P848 billion in interest. Add to that almost a Ptrillion more in pork barrel entitlements for our greedy legislators, built into the NEP by “prior consultation” with the DBM and more added in congressional insertions plus the notorious bicam, and what little is left, one wonders with rage in the gut.
Riding in a van traversing the beautiful Tuscan countryside to our hotel in historic Siena, one of my travelling companions wondered if he should have bought an old house in Italy that was being offered for one euro, spent fifty thousand more to make it livable, and thereafter enjoyed “la dolce vita,” free from the perpetually maddening existence despite “LOVE the Philippines.”
We know someone who made billions in the past, now on the verge of shedding most of it, but has since taken a golden visa via sunny Malta on the shores of the Mediterranean. With a Maltese permanent residence, he can traipse throughout Europe, ski in Chamonix during the winter, even watch the northern lights in Scandinavia or Iceland.
But far from the madding crowd physically does not provide escape from the happenings in the motherland, or worries about the future of the “saling-lahi” in a land long and continually bereft of hope.
Charge that to the wonders of the internet, even if sometimes many of us seniors pine for the days when life in the Philippines was much simpler, where one could drive from Makati to Cubao in 15 minutes, dive or snorkel in the small islands off Nasugbu a few hours away, and even affordably board a flight from Manila to Mactan’s then quiet beaches, and though Baguio was six hours away, the smell of pines was scintillating, and Session Road was genteel.
So I have decided to spend my 10 days here trying as best as possible to shut off my laptop and free my cellphone from news about the homeland, even as yesterday and tomorrow will be “momentous” in our politics.
Part of our schedule is a pass-through of Verona, where Shakespeare wrote about the Montagues and the Capulets, similar to the House of Marcos and the House of Duterte, and unless crowds of tourists dismay us, perhaps pose for a picture in Juliet’s balcony where Romeo poetically asked: “Arise fair sun and kill the envious moon, who is already sick and pale with grief.”
When will we ever have a fair sun that will slay the darkness that envelops us all?
(Editor’s Note: Lito Banayao is out of the country. He will resume writing his column pieces on June 23, 2025.)
