Two worlds of Leni

Shortly after her proclamation as winning vice presidential candidate, Leni Robredo took her brood of three daughters on a well-deserved vacation. They first visited a few local tourist destinations before heading off for the foreign leg of their R and R. If the usual commuters on her favorite bus have missed her presence, now they know where she is.

There is nothing wrong with vacations, of course. Vacations are wonderful. They enrich lives and broaden horizons. They provide needed breaks. Even those who cannot afford to hide off to some place, like presumably most people on her favorite bus, just having a day off to loll in bed is comfort enough already for the weary soul. No one must, therefore, begrudge Leni and her family for having one.

So what is the problem? Nothing really. I just feel bad for her fellow commuters on her favorite bus. For a while there, they must have thought that Leni was truly one of them, that for as long as they were together on the same bus, they were truly equals. But bus rides never last forever and her fellow passengers have been rudely awakened to the fact that no matter how snugly they were together in a bus, most of them can never really afford a grand vacation as easily as she does.

It is, of course, no fault either of Leni if she can afford a vacation and her fellow bus passengers could not. What she can afford she truly must have earned. That was never the intent of this discourse. What is at issue is her effort to portray herself as something she is not. Just because she rides a bus does not make her an equal to her fellow passengers. Just because she wears slippers does not mean she cannot afford to buy expensive shoes.

Leni taking the bus now looks so contrived in light of her multi-destination, multi-national vacation. Her insistence on taking the bus now looks too oriented toward making political capital out of what otherwise would have been normal to the apolitical or non-ambitious. I can still remember how a photo of Leni standing on the roadside waiting for a bus was splashed in the newspapers. Now that she is the VP, I fully understand what for that was.

Even if she did not have a hand in the taking and publication of the photo, she still could have called up the newspapers. That she didn't suggests she was ok with it. What she did not realize was that the photo did not have the innocence and truthfulness intended by those behind its taking. To the discerning, her slip showed in that photo. The gullible, of course, lapped it up. Until she had her vacation.

Those who have seen the light cannot but feel all pukey just picturing her on a bus seated beside life's harassed, and then fastforwarding to another scene of her taking selfies alongside thick-wadded visitors to Asia's prime destinations. They might even want to imagine her, passport in hand before a foreign immigration officer, and then to the future when she takes her oath before the barangay captain of the poorest nook in her native Camarines Sur.

Some things just do not jibe, either because one is true and the other is false. It is up to you to determine which picture of Leni you are willing to believe. Again I do not begrudge Leni her well-deserved vacation. People who can do go off for some fun or rest. But it is not about the vacation. It is about staying in one place in pretense and then going off to another where the heart really is.

Leni can very well take care of her advocacies without having to make a spectacle of herself. The bus rides and the slippers do not make her more pro-poor than she really is. There are very rich people in this country who have done so much for the poor than even the government itself has done without having to get down from their air-conditioned limousines and mingle with the masses just to prove what needs no proving.

There are many among us who give substantially but anonymously. They are the real reasons why there is still hope in such a seemingly hopeless world – because amid so much hypocrisy, there are still many honest people who work silently in the sidelines, probably pleasing God so much as to give the world another chance. These people need not wear rags or go barefoot to appear god-like. They are what they are.