11/13/2015 Vanishing Act

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".

Guilt Tripping

Studying in private schools for most of my life has taught me all about the noble art of guilt tripping. To get even a "good enough" education in this country, you have to go to private schools and most private schools are run by religious groups. Naturally, the only people who can afford to send their kids to private schools are the middle and upper class, a fact that the priests who run the private schools never shut up about.

In the catholic school I was in, I was taught that there were many dirt-poor children in the country who were starving and could barely afford to eat a square meal and It was all my goddamned fault for being born to a well-to-do family. I was repeatedly told that I was one of the fortunate ones who were lucky enough to come out of the right vagina. I was told that I could have been born to a poor family and that I should be grateful for my fortune and while I'm at it, put more money in the donation box. There were many outreach programs I had to join wherein I was thrust straight in the middle a poor community or something just so the priests could enjoy seeing me squirm and feel out of place for being the only person in the area who didn't smell like sour milk . "Now YOU know how THEY feeeeeeel." they would say from their air-conditioned van. I felt terrible in the middle of such squalor. It was a bad feeling. It was guilt. This is the art of guilt tripping.

To those who do not know or have never experienced being guilt tripped (which means you are probably poor or an atheist), guilt tripping, simply put, is when people prey on your insecurities to make you feel guilty enough to do what they want. "Can't you donate some coins? Have a heart." Guilt tripping is what the church, with it's obsession with morals, does best. The church is always whining about how people today are ungrateful bastards who don't do enough for the poor or how the mere crumbs from our table are enough to feed a family of six. It's not just the priests who are good at this, pretty much any authority figure, hell, anyone can play the guilt tripping game if they are good at it. Parents can tell their kids, "You little shit! We work and work hard for you but you just keep whining and whining about actually wanting a party on your birthday. Now get out, mommy and I need to talk in private, upstairs, in the bedroom." Guilt tripping makes you feel morally superior too. "Let's go out to a fancy restaurant." "How can you want to go out to a fancy restaurant while there are children being eaten alive by vultures in Africa." Speaking of Africa, people guilt trip entire nations too. This isn't unique to the Philippines as hardly anything is. I bet Americans are always told how lucky they are to live in the first world and that they should do more to help starving Ethiopians or something. Poor bastards, I can relate being told to give stuff to complete strangers who will most likely become dependent instead of self-sufficient. Whatever.

Now that I'm older and gone through enough guilt tripping and become wise to it, my body has pretty much built an almost perfect resistance to guilt tripping. Eventually you will realize that not everything is your fault and it's pretty much impossible to solve all societies problems by simply throwing your extra money at it. So whenever people tell me that I should feel bad about eating a cheeseburger while the poor eat dirtburgers well, you know what? Fuck the poor. Not my fault they have so many children.