Unloving San Fernando

I LOVE San Fernando.

So brilliant a gambit by the slate of Mayor Edwin Santiago to appropriate that oh-so-original, oh-so-profound blurb as team brand for 2019. Aha! Ha, ha, ha, ha.

I Love San Fernando.

Seriously now, it dredged the long-silted channel of memories of elections past in the city, rock-bottoming to 1995.

Luguran taya ing San Fernando. 

It was then-Vice Mayor Reynaldo B. Aquino that raised that clarion call, ultimately heard loud and clear by the electorate, installing him at the mayorship and keeping him there for three consecutive terms, thereafter moving on to the 3^rd district congressional seat with the geographically adapted Luguran taya ing Tersera Distritu.

It was on the sidelines of a candidates’ forum at the University of the Assumption that I asked then-incumbent Mayor Paterno Guevarra of his take on his rival RBA’s exhortative Luguran slogan.

Deceiving. Always afresh at each remembrance is the contempt that contorted the usually benign mien of the religious Pat as he spat out “Mapanlinlang.”

Gratuitous. What need was there to still plead with the people to love San Fernando, when they already loved San Fernando? So, he reasoned.

How then should the slogan read?   

I Love San Fernando.

Pat putting inflected stress on the second syllable.

Not that the Fernandino voters loved Guevarra less, but that more of them voted for Aquino. So, it subsequently turned out. Writing finis to Atty. Pat’s political career. (No implied meaning here to impress upon the city’s current events. Whatsoever). 

I Love San Fernando.

In these the times of Mayor EdSa, what is there to love in San Fernando? Better yet, what does it mean to love San Fernando?

Love is patient.

It takes infinite patience for motorists, be they in private cars, public transport or delivery vans and trucks to sit through the hellish gridlock at just every traffic light through the length of MacArthur Highway in the city.

Love is kind.

It takes the kindness – and compassion – of the divine not to damn those inutile traffic aides doing nothing by the roadside, anarchy running amuck right under their very noses.

It takes the full measure of human kindness not to wish perdition on those motorcycles, tricycles and tri-wheelers flouting all traffic laws in flaunting their dominion of all city roads.   

And be reminded of kindness to animals when treading through city sidewalks appropriated by vendors as their proprietary stores. 

It takes a leap of faith not to ascribe 1 Corinthians 13:4 as precisely scribed for EdSa’s San Fernando.   

Love is blind.

Loving San Fernando warrants total loss of vision at the sight of trashed and silted esteros and its very river, heaps of rotting rubbish all around on weekend mornings, heavily-laden garbage trucks still trooping to the supposed-to-be-long-closed city dumpsite in Barangay Lara by the FVR Megadike.

The inescapable stench though again requires the proverbial patience of Job.

Yes, blind as blind can ever be to love San Fernando’s midnight darkness in that Balite stretch of MacArthur Highway.

Indeed, lovers of San Fernando cannot see the ugly follies their officials commit. To perverse, rather than paraphrase, William Shakespeare.    

I Love San Fernando.

Warts and all, forevermore. It can only be madness. What with the littlest, if any, chance of change for the better. Given the inertia afflicting, aye, endemic to the city hall of Mayor EdSa.     

Love is a serious mental disease.

So, Plato philosophized. No thanks to him, “madly in love” descended from the romantic to the psychopathic.

As in, I Love San Fernando. In the time of Mayor Edwin David Santiago.