WORM'S EYE

Superstitious traditions

During the New Year, I was pissed off because my friend XXX texted me something banal as I was heading back to the big city. It’s an otherwise nicely-put message about starting the year wrong by being too negative. I retorted, “Cite your source (of that message) or you’ll be shot like the Ceaucescus!” My attempt at light-heartedness failed.

"What’s wrong with being negative if it’s something I take to be right?" I riposted. Besides, I am not affected by all that – starting the year off negatively doesn't necessarily result in one whole negative year – because I don’t give a flying fig about superstitions.

I left home being contrite for everything people shouldn’t do in New Year’s Eve, and I am referring to all those beliefs in good luck which I’ve long taken to be not harmful but actually are – wearing polka dots, setting the noche buena table into a 12-fruit choreographic extravaganza, each piece invariably spheroidal in shape, to signify good fortune, wealth, prosperity. And don’t forget to throw away any glazed figurines representing birds, turtles and owls because they signify bad luck.

What disgusts me all the more, the Philippine trimedia encourage these beliefs in swerti and then cap each segment or news feature with the conclusion that we should seek God first "pa rin, katuwaan lang naman ‘to," a statement I find utterly inconsistent.

For me, it’s like the entire Filipino nation cursing itself for one whole year by appeasing all sorts of unidentified spirits. So go ahead, shoot me, sue me, badmouth me behind my back, tell me I'm bad for business, and call me a fundamentalist, but I half-suspect that putting our faith and fate in feng shui and fortune-telling is an enterprise hatched up by the greeting cards and imported fruits industry, in cahoots with the feng (fung?) shui masters.

My textmate XXX (who just published an article about those crazy Lent superstitions the Church never approved of) laughed out loud to that, saying Amen! Not that we are ecstatic about Paul Lau or anyone else dying all of a sudden, but Lau’s death, like XXX said, is a perfect argument against feng shui because he failed to divine his own sudden demise.

On the other hand, I am reminded of A.C., a psychotherapist, telling us that traditions have a role to play in a society. "Tradition is not that bad. For one, they foster community, they are a source of cultural identity." If we don’t have traditions, indeed, what else are we to do aside from physiological sustenance and our morning ablutions? How are we going to deal with sheer boredom from so drab an existence?

But this piece is not a case against traditions, especially good traditions. By all means, let’s perpetuate traditions. But can’t we create new ones, too? Can’t we have something better and superior?

For me, the only other valid scapegoat to preserving such traditions is the anthropological -- studying our past ways, the better to illuminate the present.