Huling Upos ng Hope

Pasuntok ang subsob ng noo sa pader
na may pulang tato ng himutok,
wala akong iniwan sa pinitik kong upos
ng kahuli-hulihang Hope,
sagad na sa filter ang tira ng usok
at ngayo’y nagkikikisay na tila nakorner
sa lamat ng lunson at nagkakandaulol
sa hagupit at hambalos ng pinipilit kong ihi.
Itataktak ko pa ba O Diyos
Ang talunan kong titi?
Pasuntok ang katok sa lipunang pader,
Dapat pa bang ipagdaup
Ang laylay kong siper?

Albert Alejo, S.J.
mula sa Sanayan Lang ang Pagpatay


The bell rang, signaling the end of my Marcel class with Fr. Ferriols. I looked at my watch. It was 8:50 in the morning. I quickly gathered my things, ready to bolt out of the classroom. Restrained only by the monotonous intonation of the good priest’s Ave Maria, I prepared myself for the hurried thirty-minute trek to reach my 9:30 German Language Class at the Goethe Institut in New Manila.

I had to be outside the gates of the Ateneo by exactly 9:00 a.m. if I was not to be late. The traffic hold-up increases exponentially with every minute’s deviation from the schedule, I kept on thinking to myself. It had been a set routine for the whole summer. I did not want to be late.

I turned onto Aurora Boulevard from Doña Hemady, as scheduled, and I knew that I was going to make it. There was just one more stoplight before the Institut, and it would turn green in a moment’s notice. I sped along, crossing Gilmore Avenue, and out of the corner of my eye— there he was again, that stooped old man with a blue PVC pipe for a cane. His skin was a dirty shade of brown, and his outstretched hand looked like an immoveable fixture on his bent body, as though it had calcified in that position, and had, through time, turned into stone! I had no time to look, however. The light was green, and I had to attend class.

For three weeks now, the stooped old man with the blue PVC pipe for a cane would stand there, at exactly the same place, and in exactly the same way, as I cross the intersection of Aurora Boulevard and Gilmore Avenue. He looked, as the stoplight at the intersection, like a permanent fixture in the landscape, almost static and dead.

About two weeks ago, my family was invited to vacation with some relatives at the Tagaytay Highlands in Cavite. I had never been comfortable going there, because I felt that it was too anesthetized; I felt like something short of a hedonist. Yet I was comfortable and rested. It was difficult to argue with decadence.

We had also invited some guests to vacation with us for the weekend. The children, especially, were particularly excited since they were rarely brought for extended vacations. During the afternoon of the first day there, I decided to give them a quick tour. And so we drove from our cottage, towards the clubhouse, and on our right was a magnificent view of Taal Lake. My cousins were spellbound.

“Wow, ang ganda pala ng Pilipinas!” one of them said.

And another quite innocently, although quite poignantly replied: “Oo, para sa mga mayayaman.” Indeed, it was a statement straightforwardly made, and yet, I was taken aback by the truth of its simplicity. Ang ganda pala ng Pilipinas para sa mga mayayaman. And indeed, I knew that it was true.

That next Tuesday, I was back in Manila, and into my hectic, daily routine. The bell rang, as it has for the past weeks, and off I went to my German class in Goethe. There was the usual traffic, the usual haste, and of course, the stooped old man with the PVC pipe for a cane at the intersection of Aurora Boulevard and Gilmore Avenue. The difference that Tuesday, however, was that the light was red, and I stopped in front of him. And I looked.

It was not an easy task. Perhaps it really is human nature to recoil from suffering. Or was it something else? His toothless plea was hardly audible from the drone of the engines, and the deep furrows on his face spoke eloquently of his age. There was a pang of pity, and then of comparative self-satisfaction, and then of confusion: Ang ganda pala ng Pilipinas. . . para sa mga mayayaman.

At that moment, at the corner of Aurora Boulevard and Gilmore Avenue, I saw in the fact of that old man, the real crux of the issue of poverty in the Philippines—his existence, a silent indictment against us who choose to look away and speed by—the chasm between the poor and the rich, the critical tension between equity and equality, of getting what one works for, and getting what one deserves.

This is, no doubt, a very complex issue. Yet it is a reality that we all experience everyday, as we drive in our air-conditioned vehicles, and relax in the golf clubs of Tagaytay. But, just as we experience this social reality daily, it is, nonetheless, an experience that is anesthetized. Social justice is, for many of us, a slogan for debate and discussion, an illusory ideal meant to be grasped at. We know of the existence of the poor, and desire justice for their suffering, and yet we are unable to truly empathize with their plight. In a certain sense, we cannot help them because we are not one of them. We have made them into mere comparisons for our good-fortune, and objects of our social guilt.

We have heard statements like, “The poor make us aware of our blessings,” or, at the sight of beggars on the street, the thought that inadvertently comes out is that “you should be thankful for what you have.” Indeed, there is nothing wrong with awareness of one’s blessings or good fortune. Yet using the poor as a yardstick for one’s one prosperity perpetuates this distance between the rich and the poor even further. After all, comparisons are always relative. As a line from Erhmann’s Desiderata goes, “If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.” This attitude of comparison would also seem to imply that the life of the poor is entirely devoid of hope, wonder and love, as though only the well-to-do have a monopoly on these humanizing virtues— mistaking material poverty for spiritual emptiness.

Furthermore, the poor have also become mere objects of our social guilt. We help them not because of their inherent value as persons, but because of our discomfort. Their existence is a threat to our own security and peace of mind, so that a certain uneasiness and discomfort arising from any contact with them— we care, instead, not to look. We do not feel empathy for them. What we really feel is pity, as the poor constantly remind us of the fact that our comfortable lives are bought that the expense of their suffering. And from that pity spring an enforced action, a compulsion springing not so much from generosity as it does from guilt. We build them homes, we make them object of our charity. Not that these are very bad things; at least something is done. But still, the chasm between “us” and “them” remains. In this sense, the oft-repeated “Ubusin mo ang pagkain mo, dahil maraming naghihirap sa Pilipinas,” becomes a pale distortion of the ideal of social justice, divorcing genuine motivation from genuine action.

It is this attitude of separation, not merely of economic disparity, that is at the heart of the problem of poverty in this country. The human face of poverty has disappeared, and in its place, a dark edifice of social obligation has been constructed, cold and hopeless. Thus, in viewing the poor as mere comparisons of our good fortune, or as objects of our social guilt, the chasm between rich and poor becomes not only an economic one, but a spiritual and psychological one as well. Such a chasm of alienation and separation is, indeed, more difficult to cross.

Any genuine solution to the problem of poverty in the Philippines, therefore, involves a conscious solidarity with the poor. In directly taking part in their suffering, we eliminate this attitude of objectification, and become part of their experience, so that in knowing their hopelessness and hardship, in asking their questions and feeling their pain, we may, indeed, grow to have a genuine feeling for them, a “preferential option for the poor” that flows from a knowledge that, not only are they there, but that they are, in fact, us.

The Atenean imperative, therefore, takes on renewed urgency: Go down from the Hill. It would seem, however, that, as well-meaning all of us may seem to be, the imperative is most often left half-fulfilled. This is not because of a lack of desire. It is because of a lack of courage. Indeed, it would seem that being one with the downtrodden of this society entails not only a giving away— a sharing— but a giving up: a surrender. And that loss of comfort and dignity is not easy. Helping the poor, as one of them, will never be easy.

I myself feel like a hypocrite trumpeting solidarity as a big part of the answer to the question of poverty in the Philippines, knowing full-well that my life, and my choices have taken me far from the poor of this country. Except perhaps for the occasional outreach or charitable act during Christmas or Lent, my contact with the poor, where they are, can be characterized as fleeting, at best. And yet, perhaps, these little experiences, as all those small experiences of solidarity (if this would even be the right adjective to use), has disturbed me enough— and will continue to disturb me— away from the numbness of comparative good-fortune and objectification.

The stooped old man with the PVC pipe as a cane will perhaps never know the feeling of the cool breeze at the ridge of Tagaytay Highlands that I have learned to take for granted. And yet perhaps, in attempting to be conscious of his existence every time I look out across that peaceful landscape, in acknowledging his value and attempting to understand his suffering, I know that, in some strange and blessed way, I become inextricably bound to him, and all like him, in our common struggle for greater prosperity, humanity and hope.

* * *

Am I still disturbed today? Are we still disturbed?