They are the greatest drain on your energy, time and sanity that if you don’t wisen up and just leave them alone, you’ll get sucked into a counterproductive one-on-one with them that renders you practically useless to your candidate’s more important general campaign by keeping you away from more receptive audiences elsewhere.
You have to realize that trolls do not only thrive on the internet. There are real life trolls also whose “modus operandi” is to provoke you into an egoistic pissing contest that would take as long as it takes for you to realize that when an irresistible force meets an immovable object BOTH remain unchanged, impact after impact, ad nauseaum.
Even if you manage to demolish one of your opponent’s reasoning, there are rows of variations of the same reasoning that take its place, mimicking a shark’s teeth that keep moving forward like on a conveyor belt as you knock off the front row. It’s a pathetic effort that can be likened to trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon.
A biased mind will only see what it is all capable of seeing only.
One doctor was trying to demonstrate the ill effects of alcohol drinking on the body to a group of alcoholics. So he dropped a worm in a glass of water and another worm in a glass of alcohol. The worm in the glass of water simply crawled out. But the worm in the glass of alcohol was instantly killed.
“What’s the moral?” the doctor asked.
One alcoholic said, “Well, doctor, I see that if I keep drinking alcohol, I’ll never have worms!”
This is why even though I believe in raiding the enemy camp rather than preaching to the choir, I also have a hairtrigger-sensitive “abort button” in my brain. As soon as I realize that I’m talking to an inconvertible, I smash that “abort button” immediately, and just walk away after we exchange condescending parting shots.
“O, Joel, saan ka pupunta? Suko ka na?”
“Oo, eh, punta muna ako dyan sa kanto, bibili ng kausap na matino!”
These inconvertibles, I observe, always belong to the oldest (not just older) generations. It’s what makes them UNBEATABLE because they have unmatchable punchlines like “tubig ka pa lang hijo nung maging tao ako” or “papunta ka pa lang pabalik na ako” (I usually retort, “e pano kasi naligaw kayo ng landas!” or “ay, bakit ho? Hindi kayo nakarating sa inyong patutunguhan sana?”).
At one point, I got so exasperated at hearing these traditional rhetorical copouts that I even wrote down and collected my own comebacks for ready reference at the appropriate times.
So I knew how to handle, “maniniwala ako pagputi ng uwak, pag-itim ng tagak” (“pareho ho pong extinct na yung dalawang ibon na yan!”), or push back properly against, “yang sinabi mo tulak ng bibig, kabig ng dibdib” (“e yung sa inyo kasi singhot ng ilong utot ng tumbong!”), and really do a slamdunk against “huli man daw at magaling, nakakahabol din” (“nauna ka ngang tumayo sa harapan, nakatalikod ka naman!”)
When I tangle with aged incorrigibles like this, I can’t help but feel the desperation of seeing dystopia creep into my vision. I try my best to snap out of it, reminding myself of what former US President Barak Obama once said: that apathy is the recourse of cowards.
I can’t give up on the Philippines. I just can’t.
I take comfort in thinking of the youth. If you can just pull them away from their GameStations and XBoxes for a minute, they are so full of promise and potential, I know the Philippines is in their good hands in the future.
This is especially true in this coming 2022 elections. They have the most at stake and I know they will step up to the plate and hit homeruns all day, no matter what manipulative curveball pitches these geriatric “trapos” throw at them.
I know the youth are not pushovers--“uto-uto.” Critical thinking is not their virtue, it’s their nature. They have seen how if you let the deplorables have a free run at the reins of power, these power hungry oligarchs never let go.
The youth know that everything WRONG about the Philippines can be traced to the feudal mentality of analog-brained politicians--"techno-bobos"-- doing their worst to keep the Philippines from marching right into the digital 21st century where they are now archaic and irrelevant.
Too bad for them the youth are lording it over Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and other social media. These trapos’ slick-dressed old school “p-r” operators with their glib tongues and greasy hair pomade are dinosaurs whose last-used skillset involved operating the mimeograph machine.
The youth know—because they saw what happened to ABS-CBN and what ALMOST happened, or could still happen, to BENECO—that protecting their patrimony and posterity is going to take CONTROLLING CONGRESS and LOCAL GOVERNMENT.
Achieving this requires an engaged citizenry--especially the youth--that is willing to do whatever it takes to VOTE INTO OFFICE people who stand for their values, and to VOTE OUT OF OFFICE all those that stubbornly refuse to take the right side of issues.
I hope all youth realize this. If they don’t, they have A LOT OF YEARS ahead of them to suffer the effects of their own mistake in preserving the political idiocy of a by-gone era of old school politics.
No comments:
Post a Comment