It’s raining Bullies

Netnet Camomot

YOUR New Year’s resolution should be this: To be calm and silent amidst the storms that are being hurled at your feet. Don’t react, don’t cringe, don’t flinch, don’t yell, don’t say a word. Hush. That way, only the storms and whoever is making that possible are wasting precious time that they could have used for an important endeavor, like planting rice, or something, anything, other than hurling storms at your feet.

December was supposed to be the season for storms in the Philippines, or is that true only for Cagayan de Oro and Iligan? In case you’ve already forgotten, it was on Dec. 16-17, 2011 when Sendong hit both cities with the worst flashfloods in their histories.

Facebook has been reposting photos of that month and also of January 2012 when relief operations were ongoing along with the sprouting of tent cities. Those are posts you don’t want to remember anymore but Facebook seems convinced they’re the kind of throwback you want to be reminded of, similar to this feeling evoked by your Pet Society posts way back when.

You loved your pet in Pet Society, but you could not even recall its name, if ever it had one. Still, those were tumultuous years made lighter by that pet and the many ways you could beautify its world. Thus, the cherished memories, despite…

On the other hand, Sendong is not that kind of cherished memory. Its flash floods came and went like, well, a flash food: here one minute, gone the next, as the waters rushed from one barangay to the next, seemingly determined to wipe out neighborhoods within that minute, and leaving its victims with the deepest of sorrows as they mourned for loved ones lost and sometimes never found. The houses they could always rebuild, but losing loved ones is a permanent situation that the one left behind might not recover from.

Sendong came to mind while you were trying to analyze a particular situation that confused you. It so happened that the day before was the fourth anniversary of the typhoon, but it took you exactly a month later to have an aha moment to finally realize where that situation was coming from. Could it be a post-traumatic manifestation of Sendong? Hmmm.

But then, it’s not your duty to look for the source of that situation which you could analyze till forever and end up still nowhere near its truth. People can be mean to others because they can–that’s it. Whatever is the source of that meanness is not for you to analyze. Let them analyze their own selves if they have the patience to indulge in life’s meaning and all that jazz. Your duty is to analyze your own sources of personal situations–that’s one endeavor that already entails loads of discernment.

If you thought bullies exist only in schools, think again. Bullies grow up to be bullies, no matter what their age, even if they’re already enjoying senior-citizen discounts, they will remain bullies till death do they part. They can be a pain in the neck especially when you’re also on your way to senior citizenship and have to deal with all sorts of physical pain that comes with, uh, old age. Funny, eh? You all have white hair, tempered only by the miracles of hair dye, and here you are, still being bullied by graying and wrinkled bullies. By now, you should have learned to deal with the bullies, and the bullies should have learned there’s more to life than being a bully.

Bullies tend to manipulate a situation to make themselves look pitiful, to gain sympathy or empathy from other potential bullies. Then, they will all gang up on you in order to make you look as the bad guy. The truth shall set you free, as the saying goes. You know your truth. But how to reveal that to a world already overpowered by the so-called truth spread by the bullies? You now decide on whether to fight them and be a bully yourself, using their tactics to gain the sympathy or empathy of, hmmm, bullies? But do you even care? Will you waste your time for that? So, you choose to let them be. They are bullies. You are not. End of story.

There’s this saying that goes, “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass… It’s about learning to dance in the rain.”

And this is how you dance in the rain. There will be more dancing. The story on bullies may have ended, but the dancing has not.