Evidently, Inquirer columnist Rina Jimenez-David set out to write another unimaginative piece on presidential granddaughter Isabelle Duterte, the latest outrage fad her Yellowtard community is feasting on. This is not the point of my article here. The more interesting insights to be gleaned from Jimenez-David’s piece lies in what can be read between the lines.
The biggest nugget of insight is in how Jimenez-David describes what Christmas means to her…
Even as we try to squeeze out every second from our days, every last bit of our energy, every effing centavo still left in our wallets — just to stage the holiday feasting we’ve gotten used to — why are we obsessing about a young woman’s gowns and chutzpah?
Jimenez-David, it seems, takes the whole victim mentality cancer afflicting Philippine society to a whole new level, painting herself as a victim of no less than the Christmas season itself! Imagine our shock making mantak the notion that we consumers are such hapless victims of what is otherwise supposed to be such a “blessed” season. It is, after all, quite a “sacrifice” to prepare for all that “feasting”.
What Jimenez-David is really a victim of is her own self-imprisonment in a web of consumerist tradition of her own making. We can thank American imperialism for that (to suck up a bit to commie sensibilities). But that would be the easy thinking pathway to take. The more intelligent path is to reflect on why we, as a people, choose to remain “victims” — of anything oranyone for that matter. The journey down that smarter pathway begins with embracing simple truths around what Jimenez-David’s victim mentality is doing to us. Here are some. Isabelle Duterte’s gown does not victimise people, the police do not victimise people, the rich do not victimise people. The truth about poverty is a lot more simple:
Poor people victimise themselves.
And, no, the government is not responsible for “uplifting” the poor because, get this, the POOR are responsible for uplifting the poor. The job of the government is to create the right environment for that to happen. Perhaps there is some work that still needs to be done to achieve that. But it is important that the right expectations are set so that the sense of entitlement poor people are encouraged to nurture in their minds is stamped out once and for all.
Bleeding heart liberals should just let rich people be rich people. The reason the rich prefer to distance themselves from the “plight” of the poor is because life is too short. You either move forward or get dragged backward by emotional baggage such as what Jimenez-David and her ilk exhibit here. The difference between prosperous people and the chronically poor is that the earlier look forward while the latter wallow in the present or, worse, the past.
The more important point Jimenez-David inadvertently makes lies in her closing statement…
Thank you, Isabelle, for giving us something to chew on even as we watch our Christmas bonus dwindling into nothingness. Now at least we have someone to blame.
Indeed, whilst the financially poor rely on cash dole outs from the rich, the intellectually-impoverished too rely on the rich to throw them memetic morsels that their stunted minds can “chew on”. That’s not the fault of the rich any more than it is not our fault that the surplus food we throw out becomes food for flies, cockroaches, and other bottom-feeders.
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