Invitation to Grace Poe

NO droplet of rain had ever felt responsible for consequent killer floods that wreck fragile structures, touch off mudslides, displace thousands of families, decimate crops, and snuff out lives.

No voter would ever own up to being responsible for whatever dire catastrophe that their chosen leader would inflict upon a nation. All the voters want is to be on the side of the winner—they are not voting for their country. As a popularity contest goes, most votes are plunked down on whoever grabs the attention of the masses, and I’m afraid even human attention span which translates to capacity for focus, contemplation, and razor keen abstraction has suffered through all these decades—that span has been whittled down to a pitiable seven seconds. Seven lousy seconds that needs to be fed with maxed up logorrhea, the filthier and trashier the sound bites, the more it gets gobbled into that too-short span for attention. And the more it gets to home, where people come home to, the more familial it becomes, if only to affirm the Muslim mystic Hafiz, he who has committed the Qur’an to heart, “the words you speak become the house you live in.” Pero ang pamilya ko po sampu ng aking mga apo ay hindi nakatira sa pu--.