A Christmas scam story

One of the great regrets of my college life was that, for some reason or other, I never got to take a formal course in Philosophy, which might have helped me make sense of the moral sordidness permeating our lives today.

- JOSE DALISAY

Like many of you I've been particularly captivated by the question of why a presumably all-good and just God would allow so much evil in a divinely created world, and let good people go bad, from petty thievery to massive corruption in the flood-control billions.

I'll get back to the billions later (I think you know where this is headed), but let me start with me getting scammed, albeit small-scale, on Christmas Eve.

It started with an ad on Facebook Marketplace, where I spend more time than I probably should in search of old pens, books and the kind of odds and ends that bring joy to old men trying to buy their childhoods back. The item I saw was none of the above, but rather a decent-looking pair of secondhand jeans that I thought would fit me.

(Yes, because I'm larger than most Filipino males, and because threads today cost a fortune in the shops, almost all my clothes come used from the ukay-ukay, eBay and FB. I'm a great believer in recycling - my mom used to dress us in B-Meg feedbag cotton, if you remember that - and at my age I have no qualms about wearing some dead man's shirt, after a good wash.)