People love him. Why loathe them?

That there were at least a hundred thousand people who packed the stadium at the Leyte Sports Development Academy in Tacloban City last Saturday for a Uniteam rally led by presidential aspirant Bongbong Marcos is easy to see. People probably needed some excitement after two years of lockdowns. But to make them stand for more than eight hours in signal number one conditions, they have to love what they were doing.

And I think that is the crucial mistake the anti-Marcos forces keep making in their continuing failure to understand the kind of support Bongbong is getting. They belittle and demean that support, dismissing it as just the product of some collective amnesia, historical revisionism, or plain stupidity, madness, or lack of education. They ignore the fact that no matter how low they regard these people, they are still human.

They know how to love. More importantly, in a world made callous by progress and modernity, they have not forgotten love in its most basic, old-fashioned sense. They love Bongbong because he is one of them. He is the son of a Leyteña. His blood is the same that runs in the veins of every Leyteño. He is family. And families take care of one another. You attack him, they only close ranks tighter around him.

I know of people who actually saved up to take public transport to Tacloban. Others motored three to a bike for an hour in non-stop rain just to make it to the stadium by noon when the gates open, and who motored back after eight hours of standing in ankle-deep mud and peeing in their pants, cold and hungry as hell, and yet babbling with excitement and pride at being there, an experience to last their lifetimes.

These are people you do not insult and demean. These are human beings you do not call "bobo" just because you do not happen to share the same choice and preference. They are still your brother Filipinos who you meet every day in the same streets or neighborhoods, sit next to in church, buy fish from, went to school with, or just plain strangers unto each other on the same boat.

A neighbor who was there said he had goosebumps the moment Bongbong came up on stage. How can anyone be so heartless as to call a man like that bobo? In fact, he recalled there was a moment when a chant roared across the stadium, the crowds, teary-eyed, shouting at the top of their voices: "Diri kami bobo, diri kami bobo." It was a cry of pain, of hurt, of humiliation, of disappointment.

I don't know if it occurred to people then, but the decades of being a journalist taught me to regard that chant as something very scary and terrifying. A crowd that huge is something you would not want to work into a frenzy. I know how very quick and easy it is to go from hurt and humiliation to anger and rage. It was good the chant moved to other things onstage.

If we want to emerge from our politics as a healthy nation, we should learn to have a little respect for others. The biggest driving force that impels the Marcos campaign forward is the consolidation of both genuine support, the mental and emotional tiredness of hearing the same anti-Marcos narrative for decades, and the feeling of rejection over choices that ought to be very human and personal.

If Marcos wins, and all indications seem to say he will, it will be due in large part to the rejectionist attitude of Leni Robredo's supporters. All candidates start with only a minimum core support. What uncertain support Marcos had Robredo's cancel-minded supporters drove into becoming a hardened corps of diehards. What is happening is a kind of racism, with political color replacing skin.