How do you love a fool?

Where do you start?

I wrote in my notes yesterday at the airport while I was waiting for my flight back to cebu, looking at the landscape, personally weeping for a love for the universe that is so difficult to sustain. And oh it was long.

It was also filled with so much rage, and guilt, and frustration, the whole thing did not make that much sense.

So here I am, writing again.

I’m the one who struggles with anger, really, because I don’t like to be angry. I’ve seen how anger breaks things. And all my life I’ve been trying to build up a future away from it.

But no, I have to be angry.

I am angry – at myself for being helpless in front of glaring systemic dysfunctions, at flawed paradigms, at a people who rely on worldly powers that, obviously, do not think of things other than their gains.

I am angry and it is exhausting.

So tell me, how do you love a fool?

I only hear stories of people being locked inside haciendas and checked off on lists. Of obreros needing to vote for their amo’s candidate because it will mean food on the table, and security of life (literally). Of people in the uma holding vigils for an election movement that happens at night and daybreak. Tita, who helps mama do the laundry on weekends, says the people “pulaw” (hold vigil) because that’s when a lot of things happen during election time.

And you know how urban legends live on, they get passed on in murmurs because we’re afraid the truth will catch on and the legend dies in vain.

What I’ve seen in my hometown, I think, should be talked about. Because that’s where my “privilege” stands – I have seen a lot of things not talked about, and I have been sent to school to better understand, and I have experienced poverty myself, so I should know better, I should do more.

So maybe this is where the terrible unrest in me sits and stirs and gnaws – it says, you have finished with honors from a university by the people, and for the people, and you continue to have education there now, how do you make the same people think good for themselves?

How do you give power to their truths?

How do you deconstruct a culture that breeds this ugly contempt towards democracy? I do think that what we have now takes a form that brands and labels itself as democracy but is actually, and instead, a product of a systemic and vicious cycle of power, poverty and corruption.

So tell me again, how do you love a fool?

How can you live with yourself, each day, not doing anything?

As the seething anger in me simmers down today, I get ready to join the movements for good change (yes they exist). I hope a time will come when being educated means being a light to others, not a platform to call people bobo. Maybe that alone has perpetually estranged us from each other, and that, ironically, is the same vessel that the “influencers” use to deepen the “schism” between the “masses” and the “educated”.

So tell me one last time, how do you love a fool?

How do we love ourselves?