SS officer: “You are a Polack, not a Yid. That gives you a privilege, a choice.” Sophie: “I can’t choose! I can’t choose!” — From “Sophie’s Choice,” a 1979 novel by William Styron
SOPHIE was ordered to choose whom to keep: her son or her daughter. Finally, when she realized she couldn’t refuse her captors, she chose the boy as soldiers dragged her girl away.
Manny Pacquiao, the boxing champion who lost to Floyd Mayweather Jr. in his fight last May and is facing a battle of another kind, the 2016 elections, must decide whether he’d stay as congressman, run for the Senate, or opt for governor.
Manny’s choices are utterly different from Sophie’s. There’s no compulsion, no gun pointed at him or his kids. What he deems as pressure doesn’t come close: his wife prefers that he run for governor as she herself wouldn’t want to seek reelection as vice governor.
To Sophie, a fictional character based on a real-life setting, having to choose which child to give up or she?d lose them both was a mother’s utter horror and agony.
Manny could pick one of three options and not lose sleep over the results. He could easily be reelected as congressman or handily win the governorship, being the political lord in Sarangani and having the money if needed to buy the election. He would’ve more than a good chance of winning a Senate seat, given voters’ blind affection for celebrities.
Evidence
Pacquiao has already proven his ineptitude as congressman. Joining the Senate would just add more evidence. But he’d have some company there, senators whose admission ticket was their being a celebrity or having a famous senator for a father or a husband.
But if Manny would want to be president of the country, the Senate offers a place where what he knows and doesn’t know would be exposed to much of the nation in clear, bright optics.
