Imelda More-cost

I, honestly, am one of those people who were gullible enough to judge Imelda Marcos negatively right at the bat. What can I do, she’s so easy to judge! She is so narcissistic. While she talks about her life, her many suitors, her achievements, her lineage and her beauty, she speaks so highly of herself, it’s overwhelming.  Heck, she’s even proud of the English word, “imeldific”, that is so ego-centric in meaning and is based on her. “I am simple” she says but her extravagant hand-crafted clothes and her lavish collection of thousands of shoes say otherwise. She also came up with a bunch of symbols for life and such which all seemed to make so much sense to her but looked like doodles to me. And a number of people in the documentary about her seem to agree with my thoughts on her. Some of them despise her and her husband, former President Ferdinand Marcos with a passion.

But others didn’t. And that thoroughly surprised me. So it got me curious as to why they did like Imelda. So, first on the list of why these people admired Imelda was how she endured the grief of losing both her parents and her husband whilst enduring also the verbal abuse she is getting from the masses. I am amazed that she went through that situation so elegantly. Imelda says, "When you reach a certain level of leadership, people cannot be neutral with you. They either love, love, love you, or hate, hate, hate you". Then, the documentary got to the part where she got stabbed. Another positive thing about her was that she was an active First Lady. I think she was the first First Lady of the Philippines to “get her hands dirty” in the political world. And therefore, she has earned some of my respect. Gosh, I really did not know until watching this documentary that she was a victim of attempted assassination. And that softened my heart for her a bit. So did the time she was talking about Ferdinand while she was beside his corpse. You can feel her grief just by the aura she was giving off even though she was so composed. All of these supplement the fact that she was nicknamed the “Steel Butterfly”.

That scene reminded me that she is still a human being, having problems, feeling pain. It’s just that she’s living in a different world from ours and it might look ridiculous and narcissistic to the rest of us, but that is her life. And, now, I opt to let her be. I still dislike most of her actions, don’t get me wrong, but I dislike her a lot less than before. Actually, I shouldn’t dislike her but her actions in the first place, says my Philosophy I teacher. Her actions don’t reflect her entirely. She may still be exemplifying the “Steel Butterfly” image of hers by not showing anyone the pain she may be feeling deep inside. So I shall let her be and I should remember to not judge a book by its summary or the reviews or, in this case, people by the size of their collection of shoes.