LEAVING the uptown house an hour before a downtown appointment is now the norm in Cagayan de Oro to ensure the uptowner arrives on time or even earlier than the agreed time.
Better late than never is good only for birthday greetings. But when it comes to appointments, better early than late should be the mantra, to avoid stress, to avoid rushing from one venue to another, to avoid the traffic or at least survive through it with your optimism intact.
As one Cagayan de Oro city councilor said, the traffic is proof of a city’s progress and he began to mention other Pinas cities that have traffic, too. I wanted to ask him, But there’s no traffic in Amsterdam, does that mean it’s not progressive?
Cagayanons have been complaining about the traffic, the absence of the Roads and Traffic Administration personnel, the presence of garbage. These have been the city’s perennial problems, but only the faces of the complainants have changed.
Those who are with the current administration would, of course, refrain from complaining. But those outside of that team will complain, and there’s the pro-admin people bashing him for complaining on Facebook, complete with a little revelation: that the complainant is kind of part of the team, so, why is he complaining?
That’s when the madlang pehpohl will start to suspect that something is happening at city hall. In other words, the honeymoon stage is so over.
But there’s always something happening at city hall. A city councilor loses a chairmanship, a former mayor and the incumbent mayor are not in good terms anymore, some former department heads have been replaced and at least one wants to make a major comeback, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
With all the conflicts resulting from politics, we can now understand why some politicians tend to jump from one political party to another as they try to find the team that will accept them as they are. They may be wearing, say, green today, and violet and orange tomorrow. Until they have been there, done that with so many colors, and they become chameleons.
Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon” can then be their new theme song: “I’m a man (a man) without conviction/I’m a man (a man) who doesn’t know/How to sell (to sell) a contradiction/You come and go, you come and go/Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma chameleon/You come and go, you come and go/Loving would be easy if your colors were like my dreams/Red, gold, and green, red, gold, and green.”
Talk of colors, I attended a meeting where the attire theme was to wear our lucky color. A member arrived wearing a yellow dress. I then asked her, So what’s your lucky color? She showed me her yellow bag and gold-ish shoes and we both laughed because need I ask? Haha!
I, on the other hand, wore blue. I consider navy as my lucky color because that and black were my reliable colors then when I was fat. If I can change my wardrobe’s colors depending on my body weight, I guess politicians can change their political colors, too, depending on the political party that will accept them.
