Aspirational
MEDIUM RARE
Inspiration breeds aspiration leads to perspiration. So like the bamboo that sleeps, creeps,
leaps!
During the campaign, BBM did not so much promise to bring down the price of rice to ₱20 a kilo as to express an aspiration. The clerk who’ll never get to own a signature bag that costs a fortune (or five
years pay after subtracting rent, food, transpo, vacations) knows in her heart that it’s a long way to waltz to the same music as Jinkee and Sharon and Heart, but the distance, though from here to sorority may be daunting, won’t stop her from dreaming.
Inspired by her idols, Ms. Clerk prays to win the lotto jackpot, marry a rich guy who will spoil her to high heavens, or work hard, so very hard, to be one step closer to the holy grail. In that sense, she’s not far from PBBM, who fearlessly placed on his own shoulders the burden of “finding solutions” to what ails the national goal to increase farm productivity and lower food prices.
In his work as a farmer-journalist, Zac Sarian’s gospel of the soil was to convince writers and readers to stop describing the Filipino farmer as poor. “The farmer is not poor, stop calling him poor,”
he preached. “He doesn’t need your pity. Respect him.”
There are some very rich farmers out there who’re just keeping a low profile. Before the pandemic,
Mila How’s Universal Harvester and her Jaycee friends held a yearly search for “outstanding farmers,”
rewarding them with cash rewards and other incentives. Reading about their achievements, I was convinced that the smartest farmer is also a farmpreneur.
In the early years of the millennium, Henry Lim Bon Liong, who was tutored by China’s hybrid rice
king, was proud to present on TV his first batch of farmer-millionaires who had switched to hybrid farming.
Aspire from the ground up! Speaking of aspirations, who’d dare aspire to play Cherie Gil, the screen’s classiest b_tch and vampiest vamp, a contravida who was in a class by herself? She didn’t need to hiss like a serpent, she could do it in a whisper. No waterfall of tears for her, a drop was enough, the
rest was a secret ingredient. Cherie made bad gorgeous.