(Above, prewar Philippines Free Press editorial cartoon)
Today is Blog Action Day, with the theme of Poverty.
I am republishing an article I wrote in two parts, the first when I was still in college, the second, a decade later upon rediscovering what I’d written a decade earlier…
Apology not accepted
YOU were standing by the jeepney stop in front of the Faculty Center. How you got there, I don’t know. It was early afternoon.
The weather was pleasant. I was in one of my endless sophomore years. You had on one of those simple dresses of 1940s cut, which the modest of means never gave up wearing long after the originals which had arrived during Liberation had out served their usefulness. I think your dress was a pale yellow; I know it was scrupulously clean, and I wondered whether you used Superwheel or Tide, or Perla and starch.
Funny. It was a pleasant afternoon but you had one of those little collapsible umbrellas, the most inexpensive kind, made of the thinnest nylon the manufacturers could inflict on their consumers.
A slight breeze lifted a wisp of your white hair, which you patted back in place. You had a half-smile -did I imagine the twinkle in your eyes, perhaps? You looked like a woman with a sunny disposition. Perhaps it was just the softening effects of age.
When you were young, your family and friends probably told you that they found you pretty, because of your fair complexion. Did you marry? Were you courted, in school? And what did you do over the years, I wonder. What sort of jobs did you hold?
Students hurried past you; occasionally particularly indiscreet passers-by stared at you, but you just stood there, looking around. You must have been used to being stared at, because of your skin. I have never managed to find out what your skin disease is called -if can be properly called a disease; maybe medicine has a more exact term for what you had. I’ve seen pictures of people -all elderly, if I recall correctly- with the same affliction. Little globules (of what? solid flesh? skin with something underneath?) covering every inch of the body.
Globules in the shape of lumps, others in the shape of small nuts which seem to have sprouted on the skin, ready to fall off. Growths whose composition I have always wondered about -growths which reduced you to a mass of protrusions and made you a sight for the idle to gawk at.
Disconcerting, how your affliction managed to shock without provoking disgust. Or maybe i’m wrong. In remembering the day I saw you I might be retroactively censoring my real feelings. Yes, I was disturbed. How can you live with such a disease, with such disfigurement, made all the more startling because no one can fathom its origin. You have no scars. You’re missing no limbs, you have nothing that can be attributed to the effects of a birth defect or some tragic experience. Although of course having your body covered in strange lumps and bumps must constitute a tragic experience in itself.
From the little I know -mainly from the testimony of an old man in a news article I clipped and since lost- you were not born “that way” (what a phrase!). What provoked the growths? The depredations of age gone more completely awry than usual?
Then you went up to me.
“Can you spare some money,” you asked, gently.
Flustered, I said no.
You smiled. And said. “I’m sorry.”
I said, “it’s ok.” And then I walked away.
The feeling one has when one’s soul wants to vomit: why did you say sorry to me? You should have said, “apology not accepted”.
***
YUKIO Mishima once wrote, “I came out on the stage to make an audience weep and instead they burst out laughing”.
Since you apologized over my apology, I have encountered many who remind me of you, though none exactly like you. Just the other week, and what has it been –a decade?- since we briefly met, I saw a man with no legs, sitting on the sidewalk by the wall of Camp Crame leading to the LRT, holding a plastic cup.
He was looking up at another man, dressed neatly in a kind of dutifully-washed-and mended polo shirt. The man was engaging him in conversation. Was the man a writer, perhaps, or simply someone on his way to work, engaging the man with no legs in conversation?
People rushed past. They gave the two troubled looks. What is more disturbing: to see a man with no legs begging on the pavement, or a countryman pausing to converse with him, man to man?
I saw that scene only briefly. We only see such scenes briefly, if at all. Just the other day, there was the scene, awful, and heart-breaking if only we weren’t so used to it. The parade, my writer’s mind tells me to call it, of the dispossessed. In front of St. Paul’s College, Quezon City, there is, day in and out, a man in his early fifties, piteously deformed; almost, it seems, a Thalidomide baby condemned to advanced years. He has become such a fixture that surely every person passing him by day to day has come to memorize his every twitch, his slack-jawed fatalism. On some days, a sign hands around his neck. Over the holidays it said, “Merry Christmas, God Bless you.” I gave him coins once. He tried to say thank you. Part of me was glad he was incapable of mouthing the words.
But of that parade, and they come in every shape, age, sex, and size –there is the blind old lady, with white hair, clothes of charitable origin, whose gaping eye sockets mercifully cannot see what her seeing-eye guide, probably a granddaughter, sees minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. The knock; the look of muted pleading; the counter-knock from the impatient, saying, “your petition is dismissed”; the shuffle on to the next vehicle.
Yesterday there was a man. He was missing a hand. He did the ritualized shuffle, too. Knock, plead, suffer rejection, shuffle on to the next, repeat. Around him and ahead of him swarmed children doing the same thing. One child was particularly passive; she knocked on one window, was rejected, sat on the sidewalk and sulked. Some others made it a game. One little girl got no coins, though a motorist handed her some crackers. She smiled the smile of a Pacquiao.
That man, though. One motorist was particularly curt. The man reacted with a look of rage. I have seen that look of rage more often now, than ever before. I never used to see it. He was not even given an apology. But as for his condition, he could at least express his hate.
circa 1994 and 2004. It is 2008, and they are still there, in front of St. Paul’s.
October 25th, 2008 at 11:26 am
i live along new manila.. i see the old-man-by-st. paul univ wall quite often.. everyday, early in the morning, two men in a tricycle bring him there, unkindly dragging him to the same spot, and oblivious to the questioning stares of motorists..
with muffled pleas coaxed by involuntary twitching of facial and body muscles, the beggar appeals to pity.. pity.. pity that for us can be unburdened with a toss of a few pesos, centavos.. how sure are we that such kind of pity is what he begs for?.
i wonder what runs in the mind of such a man.. maybe, he is happier in that roadside corner, at least people see him and feel a pinch of guilt in their hearts.. maybe he suffers a forlorn existence in the confines of his home where his family eyes him merely as a commodity, a potential measure to mulch people of their precious centavos.. or maybe, just maybe, his toothless gape, his expresionless eyes and his seeming difficulty in moving his faculties could all be part of a personal effort to say, “Why me, God, and for what?!”
October 24th, 2008 at 11:57 am
when i do stop to wonder what their story is, of those people who are out there begging, participants of the “parade of the dispossessed”, i am glad that i can still do so. that i have not become so apathetic to the rest of humanity. i always imagine what it would be like, if I were the beggar, and if people would ever spare a second to wonder what my story was.
October 24th, 2008 at 8:41 am
What blessings are we talking about? With or without this ‘world economic meltdown’, we are a different breed. Our government has over borrowed beyond our capacity to pay (were shall we get the 862 billion pesos interest payment for 2009?); our Government is only good making empty speeches and slogans.
There are many self appointed experts in Malacanyang. Look what this government did last SONA. The son ‘congressman’ spends 200 million pesos refurbishing the Batasan for his mother’s (PGMA) 30 minutes speech amidst widespread poverty.
What blessings are we talking about? Our peso today has passed 49 is to one dollar, and rapidly depreciating; if Argentina may default anytime, what more with our government headed by PGMA?
Only fools believe in PGMA speeches. Even foreign businessmen are laughing behind her back when ever she speaks of Macro-Micro financing, and other trite speeches. Our lady President is running out of topic in her speeches other than repetitious and trite oration. She is running out of lies.
October 23rd, 2008 at 8:37 am
Believe it or not, the Chinese in the Philippines are more racist than there host country, the Philippines.
Just look at our banks. Most if not all are owned by ethnic Chinese. And who are on the top echelon of the management? Chinese!
Look at our major businesses, most if not all are owned by Chinese.
Look at our Media: the T.V., the radio stations, the newspapers; all are owned by Chinese.
Look at our utility businesses such as Electricity and Water, all are owned by Chinese.
Who controls our shipping lines? Chinese!
Even our priesthood is being over-run by ethnic Chinese. (This is the reason Jun Lozada did not get the support of the church.)
Even PGMA’s ancestors are Chinese.
There was systematic take-over by the Chinese on all venues, may it be the businesses, the Media, the food distribution and even our government,
Everything you can think of, they control it.
Only two ethnic Filipino Philippine President succeeded to win in the election. One was backed and finance by C.I.A. which was then late Ramon Magsaysay. The winning slogan of “Magsaysay is my guy” was in fact coined by C.I.A. And the other is backed by the masses, ex President Joseph Estrada. Both did not finish their term. One was blown out of the sky; the other was dethroned by people power.
President Ramon Magsaysay’s slogan of “Filipino First Policy” caused his down fall. This slogan brought a chilling effect among the Chinese community. It means the relinquishing of their economic dominance in the country. So, before this policy took effect, he was eliminated.
Ex President Joseph Estrada’s down fall was forth coming even before he occupied Malacanang. His enemies really did their homework. They took advantage on the weakness of his character wherein he is always supportive to his close friends’ hell or high water, the “Barkada mentality. The word “utang na loob” was also Estrada’s nemesis.
It was his so called close friends (ethnic Chinese) who see to it that he will look ridiculous before the eyes of the people. They would couch him to go to the Casino, back by unlimited ‘free funds’ to play while taking a sneaking shot for the Media. It was this group who gave him the Mansions for free, again for media consumption. It was also this group who tempted him to the billions of pesos protection money from the illegal numbered games.
Both former Presidents never finished their term because they are ethnic Filipinos.
My question is between the administration of ex President Estrada, and PGMA, in whose administration is more corrupt; who between the two committed extensive human right violation; who did the most lies; who squandered the most of people’s hard earned tax; who made more useless trips abroad; who used the Military and PNP to commit crime against the people; Estrada or PGMA?
Who appointed ethnic Chinese as Cabinet Ministers?
One is an ethnic Filipino; the other has ethnic Chinese ancestors.
The problem arises went ethnic Chinese are the ones who govern. The ethnic Filipinos does not stand a chance to avail on the billions of loans offered for development. It is next to impossible for an ethnic Filipinos to obtain a ‘soft loan’ from his own government banks and institutions.
For a song, it is easier for S.M. Establishment to get loans from GSIS, SSS, or DBP compare to a lowly ethnic Filipino entrepreneur. This is one reason why S.M. malls mushroom all over the Philippines. Their capital came from the hard earned contributions of Ethnic Filipino masses. Ethnic Filipinos are discriminated in their own country from the very institutions they established.
The problem now is that, our ethnic Chinese dominated government is divesting properties which are primarily owned by the ethnic Filipinos. Port Bonifacio, Petron government shares, reclamation area in Roxas Boulevard, Meralco government shares , government land areas leased to commercial establishment, all are rapidly being sold or rented for as long as 100 years, all to the disadvantage of ethnic Filipinos.
And what does the poor gets from our Chinese dominated government? Lip service, bag full of air and nothing more. Worsted, PGMA suggested to the poor ethic Filipinos to eat noodles. Noodles and rice would definitely make you stupid.
And that is what the ethnic Chinese Filipino community wants to achieve, to make the ethnic Filipinos more malnourish so that they are easily manageable.
This to me is one form of Ethnic Cleansing.
October 21st, 2008 at 11:19 am
I wish there are a lot more articles like these printed in the newspapers or in the internet,We are most tired of reading about the inept senate and congress and all their politics.when you read about the politicians all you can hear or read about is their bickerings and investigations,has there been any progress or has anything attained on these investigations,so far none and they are just wasting the taxpayers money for nothing.