CHICKENPIE.A jeepney stalls on EDSA. The driver doesn't curse. He turns up the radio.
Three senators are trading jail cells like baseball cards this week. One of them boarded a flight to Singapore on Wednesday. Nobody's sure if it was a vacation.
And SWS just released a survey. More Filipinos than last quarter expect their lives to get better in the next twelve months.
Read that again.
We're the country that watched a shipping company get named after somebody's cousin, watched the foundation get named after the same cousin, watched the cousin shrug on television — and the survey says optimism is up. Rice is still expensive. Gas still climbs every other Tuesday. Traffic still eats two hours nobody gets back. And the number went up anyway.
That's not naivety. Naivety doesn't survive a fourth election cycle. This is something else. Call it muscle memory. Call it the thing our lolas built when there was no other option but to build it. Optimism, here, isn't a feeling. It's infrastructure. You maintain it the way you maintain a jeepney — with tape, with prayer, with whatever parts are lying around — and it still somehow gets you to Divisoria and back.
Other places, hope is a mood that shows up when things go well. Here it's a discipline that shows up whether things go well or not, because it has to, because the alternative is standing still in EDSA traffic with nothing to hold onto but the horn.
The senators will keep swapping cells. The polls will keep tracking us like we're a fever they're trying to break. And somewhere on a jeepney with a stalled engine, somebody is going to turn the radio up anyway, and mean it.
We didn't need a poll to tell us we're hopeful.
We never stopped practicing.
