THE first five persons to read this or click on “like” at the bottom of this screen will receive an indeterminate amount of money within the next week; those who do not click on “like” or go directly to the Crossword/Sudoku page will have three consecutive weekends of misery. Please pass on to your friends; if you don’t, you will not receive any birthday greetings on your Facebook page for the next 10 years.On your electronic devices, such a message would warrant a quick Options, Delete; or a click to a different website. A newspaper would have a more gruesome fate and for that I apologize to my editor and publisher.
Idle threats, craftily worded with a promise of heaven, are often taken with a grain of salt (how’s that for clichés) which I believe our service providers are aware of. A few times, before the “unli” age, I would reply that passing on messages of foreboding and/or good fortune were making the service providers richer, not them. I suspect that the resulting statistical drop in threatening memes prompted a survey among our friendly servers. For the scoffers like me, SMSs of potential abundance and bad luck were replaced by messages of good cheer: you are a wonderful woman etc., etc., pass this on to 10 wonderful women you know. Clever.
Admittedly, it’s a great marketing strategy fueled by a cultural behavior zeroed in by marketing strategists which they hope will carry on long after its profit quota. But it’s the cynic that is of interest here—the “blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be” (Ambrose Pierce); the “fun-sucker” (Freaky Friday). When did we learn to shrug off doomsday warnings and homilies to change for a better world? Or for that matter, heaven and hell?
A different framework shapes our questions every seven years, if you believe in the cycles of growth. Cynicism takes a foothold when our imagined pleasures fail a third time, when we miss the potential of a great idea, when faith and love are no longer the trump cards we keep in our hand.
We are also defined by the culture of our generation, but I’m not certain if that’s accurate. I was born at the tail-end of the baby-boom era but my familiarity with that age is more of historical curiosity than experience. I am more convinced that we begin shaping ourselves at the advent of puberty; everything before that is what our parents give and tell us.
Which brings me to my first brush with cynicism at the age of nine. We had just moved into a gated community with quiet streets, manicured lawns and a playground park just across our house. It was called Bel-Air, a name that had no meaning for me. But when the writer Maro Sto. Romana came to visit and asked me, not so innocently, “How does it feel living in a village?”, my brain took a second-take. Village?
Because I was still a product of my parents’ upbringing, raised on Aesop’s fables, American and Russian folk tales, the word “village” was a strange and magical world for me. I imagined there would be cottages, communal feasts, a woodsman, a hunter, a babayaga, i.e., friendly village people. For a few years, my friends were still my cousins who lived 10 minutes away. The closest feature my new residence had to a village was the imaginary jungle across us, and that I could walk through the streets without fear of being run over.
A few months after moving in, the village took an ugly countenance when one morning, as my sister and I were getting ready for our annual visit to the family’s crypt in Cavite, we found ourselves staring in shock at the frontage of our house. It’s low black gates and the cement fence in between them was covered with streams of toilet paper, with black and red letters painted on them screaming Kuripot, Madamot, Swapang!
Did we do something wrong? I asked myself. Did our parents have a fight? Did they think we were creating a Frankenstein in the backyard? Are we violating some village code? Who would hate us? With worried, frantic faces, we called our parents outside and pointed at the odium directed at our family. While waiting for a reaction, I saw a crowd of strange Makati people carrying torches come nighttime, shouting at us newcomers to leave the premises.
My mother gave a gasp and said “Oh, it’s Halloween!” It’s a what? we asked. She then told us of this American holiday and the trick-or-treat visitations of children. My mind was racing—this is the work of children? The mess on our frontage stayed on for a few more days for all to see. It wasn’t easy to clean up and there was no work on All Souls’ and All Saints’ days.
Since then, Halloween was not one of those holidays I looked forward to. The following year, I reminded my mother, fearfully, that she should buy candies for these Makati monsters. If she failed, I imagined me and my sister fighting off the costumed brats with clubs and shouting expletives we would never have thought of using.
All through my young teens, I was wary of the village boys that prowled in the park. We didn’t make new friends from the village, save for Suki who was a schoolmate, unless they were friends of cousins and until we were a few years into our residency.
Now Halloween has become a metro-wide activity, prompting more market merchandise and spawning several cultural behaviors that numb even the cynic. In one village, Halloween was changed to Halo-ween, demanding that youngsters should don wholesome or Christian-inspired costumes and cast aside demons as well as witches and creatures of the Filipino middle-earth—the icons of Hallow’s eve.
Comforting with all this change is that trick-or-treat has become an idle threat as well, and the cynicism of undelivered promises made to rest for one day.
