by Maria Bratikova

The Filipino’s clamour for progress negotiates a circular path not unlike a dog chasing its tail. 

We do move but when we are done we realise that we have made a full 360° turn – back where we started, square one. We keep crawling back to the stone age, we don’t need any one to kick us back there because we crawl back voluntarily to the troglodytes that we were before civilisation dawned. 

Prime example is the latest Ms. Universe pageantry. It had concluded seemingly forever but we’re stuck in it and on it like a Minica that ran over a chewing gum and made a full stop. There’s no moving on.  Inertia! 

The Zeigarnik Effect may be useful to haul us out of the deep rut we have embedded ourselves in. Progress is a continuing process. We have to do something else that is totally divorced from our inordinate fascination with beauty pageants and prime-time soapy teevee dramas that totally water down our essences as brainy people. Is it because we believe we don’t have any other capital save our external appearances? 

Come on . . . don’t be ridi-effing- culous! We do have much more. It is necessary to interrupt our routinary activities to provoke our minds to remember it easier when we get back to it. We have been the mostliterate in Asia until the senior Marcos was oustered. The interregnum took a whopping chunk of a century to bring us to this sorry stage.

Let’s try a new scam . . . like building a jet-propulsion Apparat to catapult us out to escape the doldrums. 

Get. Out. Of. There. Do. Something.