Back to the manger
On Christmas eve, an estimate of 1,805,005 people or 452,307 families in the Visayas and Mindanao regions celebrated the birth and the life of Jesus amid their struggles for necessities such as food, water, electricity, clothing, and shelter. There are no more fancy parties where everyone wears a Great Gatsby attire and indulges in hallucinations of an affluent life.
After that long and scary night on December 16, perhaps the most frightening in recent history, Typhoon Odette stripped our lives of all the non-essentials and tested our patience and character as a person as we struggled for essential things in life.
The debacle we face today is a crucible that brings out the best and worst among the Boholanos.
The worst that we have seen so far are selfish acts of hoarding supplies such as fuel and selling them at exorbitant prices. The ugly side of this human behavior is best portrayed in a Netflix film, The Platform, which depicts a prison cell with a banquet of food descending from above on a platform, leaving the upper-tier of prisoners to eat first. In contrast, those lower and lower down the literal food chain are left fighting for scraps.
According to one review (www.standard.co.uk), the film is a twisted social allegory about humanity at its darkest and hungriest – which feels oddly prescient as many people have found themselves left fighting for food. The instinct for self-preservation may have driven people to be locked in a desperate grapple for gasoline, food, cash, and other needs. The morale of the movie is quite clear: take what you need only since getting more means depriving others of their basic need. Others have turned the crisis into an opportunity but in a deplorable way: doubling or tripling profits out of others’ miseries.
We should take only what we need during this crisis and share our extra resources with others. Any person who takes more than what he needs contributes to the chaos and makes the lives of others more miserable.
Odette may have taken away from us almost everything, but it has also given an important lesson that life is not all about how we adorn ourselves with gold and earthly possessions. We are here to fulfill a purpose that God has assigned to each of us. We may have gone astray, but before we could have indulged in another hedonistic celebration, he brought us back to the manger.