By: Atty. Marlo T. Cristobal
(Following is actually a reproduction, with some interesting revisions, of what l sent sometime ago to my high school mates and a few other friends, thus to enable viewers of Banateros.com to share the same guidance and information for a San Franciso visit).
San Francisco is a beauty to behold (in the physical sense)as tourist destination. My brother and sister-in-law drove us here from L.A. about five years ago, but since we stayed here only about three days we did not see much of this place. Nonetheless, l then had a glimpse of the lurking beauty of San Francisco beyond what l could see from that majestic place we were emplaced in the San Francisco Bay area. Such is a dynamics you experience no different from that of seeing a beautiful woman whose slit dress extends to her thighs and lo you are then and there visited with the “wisdom” that there are more to see and explore beyond that slit that hints a more of unseen “majesty” lying all around waiting to be discovered (pardon the usual colorful simile and methapor that l normally resort to to send home in close-up shots the very quintessence of the thoughts l seek to impart to my readers, and apologies for the given or preferred tactless bent only a super senior man like me is naturally guilty of).
We discovered that San Francisco had a tourist contrivance they called Big Bus Hop In Hop Out that brought her visitors to many places that were nothing less than treasures and heavens for tourists who viewed them through the bus excitement-and-view augmenting second deck open top, places of colorful history or arrant eye pleasing or mind challenging or simply emotions and memories evoking. The bus is a time machine that ferries you to the striking eras of San Francisco. It brings you virtually to its soul in a mere 24-hour trip.
As our tour bus navigated its scheduled tourist spots, the tourist guide would flash the remarkable annotations peculiar to these places concerned. Here were some colorful historical events our guide revealed and worth retelling and remembering that once bedeviled this State. In 1906, a devastating 7.9 magnitude earthquake and the resulting fire leveled to the ground San Francisco city, but the sturdy ltalian immigrants chased life and business for the city by their daily grind at the city’s wharf and by their dogged pursuit of business community in some other areas which eventually evolved into an ltalian thriving business district that has survived to this day. From these immigrants’ arduous labor we can fairly state that San Francisco rose like Phoenix from the ashes. In contrast, these immigrants’ countrymen in New York organized at about the same time the Mafia that institutionalized in New York and neighboring States a life of brutal violence and criminality. In short, one set of ltalian immigrants in San Francisco chased dear life, and another set in New York chased dear life for defilement. A classic contrast for Ripley’s, if you ask me.
In the 1960s, the LGBTQ of entire USA, converged in San Francisco to give aid to their kind in the city that overtly prosecuted them as a matter of state policy. Their protest came to a head in1967 when the protagonists, the police and the gay confederacy, erupted into a destructive violence which took the entire city by a storm. I cannot imagine this limp-wristed confederacy could put up violent uprising against the macho populace which was ironically their lone and exuberant source of bliss. The more irony of it all is, by their violence, they got what they eventually wanted: same sex marriage the State of San Francisco institutionalized. To put this scenario more picturesque, the gays fought the machos in a violent battle that they eventually won to become effectively the policy-judge to effect a decree that they could freely chase their men and engage them in a legal union. Depending on whose side you are, you could view the event as compounding then the tragedies of this State that rivaled the four great tragedies of Shakespeare we learned in high school.
The story above has some relevancy to our current political firestorm. These San Francisco descents of our modern day Vice Ganda, by a communal deed of foisting their irrepressible naughty and unusual desires through sheer violence on the rest of their society, make it no wonder that their kindred Vice Ganda of the Philippines unleashed his own irrepressible naughty and unusual perverted disrespect for the societal mores of gratitude and honor indispensably due to an old man and a former President of our Republic, who did well for our country. Vice Ganda’s sick joke directed against this old man and true leader is Vice Ganda’s sick stripe true to form.
To get back to the San Francisco events, in 1970 the Hippies, known for LSD addiction, from all over the entire America, taking their cue, staged a modern day Exodus and they, too, converged in San Francisco. They posted the feat of eventually securing the present State sanction of legalizing another delusion triggering drug: Marijuana.
This attempt at reliving the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah could be deemed the underlying passion of those events. But in this age of out-and-out materialism, who cares about the Bible. In fact its 2 Timothy 3:1-5 already warned way back from eternity about humankind heap’s eventual dehumanization, eventual irreversible doom to so-called God’s day of terrible wrath. (Please read Romans 2:5, Romans 1:18, John 3:36). This is humanity’s outright horrifying blunder. If only it can take a few seconds to pause and chew over the self-evident truth (God is naturally the antithesis of lies, please read Titus 1:2 and Hebrews 6:18) that it is impossible for God to lie, then humanity can step back and seize the chance to opt for the wisdom to do better and cease to be a freak!
More on San Francisco anecdotes in subsequent write-ups.
