Across from where I'm staying, there's a 7-Eleven. This 7-Eleven, and many others like it, had a bunch of mendicants camping outside its doors. They would ask for money and even any food or drink you were carrying with you. Call me heartless but I think it's rude to ask a person enjoying a cold beverage or tasty snack to essentially hand over all of it just like that.
And why do beggars have to physically touch you anyway? Since when did they decide this was a socially acceptable thing to do? Who enjoys being touched by people who are, let's face it folks, filthy and smelly? If they disrespect a person enough to invade his personal space, why do they think they're entitled to that person's generosity? I give change if they're not pushy, which is rare so it works for me. Invasion of personal space is where I draw the line.
Anyway, I don't have to worry about them anymore. They're gone! No, I didn't kill them. I suspect their vanishing act had something to do with the upcoming APEC nonsense that Manila is hosting. Just like what Marcos did before, we gotta hide the poor people. We can't let those rich foreigners see the horrible, soul-crushing poverty the people live in.
Thankfully, the government assures us that the street people have been taken care of "humanely". Marcos used the crude method of putting up walls to hide the shantytowns. We've taken it a step further. It's more of an art now really. It takes quite a bit of skill to make people disappear. Where have they gone? Who knows where the government shuffles them around. I remember sometime ago in Cebu, I think, where the poor were hidden away in some fancy resort (all on taxpayer dime).
For the record, the government never says they're hiding them. They simply say that they relocate the homeless as part of a welfare program. The fact that the relocation is happening just in time for the APEC is purely coincidence! We do this kind of stuff for the homeless "all the time", at least, all the time when an international summit is happening.
They called them "relocations" or "resettlements" of "housing projects" or whatever. I wonder what they're calling it now. I prefer the term "mandatory vacations". It has a nice ring to it, no?
I don't blame the government for doing what it does. I can understand the reasoning. We don't want the street folk harassing the foreign guests. But there's something profoundly dehumanizing about it. Were that all our society's problems could be hidden away in the dark; out of sight therefore, out of mind. Hey, nobody cared who the Lumads were until someone exposed them to the light. Society doesn't really care about the less fortunate. You knew that already. Is it the poor that we're hiding or is it our own cruel indifference?
As the song goes, "Too many people suffer in silence".
