I’ve given up on street kids recently. It was the sight of the oven-fresh restaurant bibingka on the curb that did it — one that I had a waiter wrap
up after realizing the dastardly stomach flu I had at the time hindered me from forking in more than a single bite — and that the plump but raggedy lad who’d tapped my window and resentfully accepted it had ditched by a lamppost, coconut shavings scattered on the asphalt and all.
Hadn’t the kid taken a whiff of the melted Laguna cheese or nibbled the sugar-encrusted, creamy-fluffy flat cake that gave any youngster — much more, anyone scouring the streets for charity — an inflated sense of wonder in the world? Wasn’t he supposed to be hard-up and desperate enough to have to hit Shaw corner Ortigas Avenue for sustenance? After feeling pretty damn good about my sensibly benevolent gesture and finding that it had been exchanged with one of utter ingratitude, it was too late to call my little friend out and cross-examine the bugger on why he’d chosen to hurl perfectly good bibingka on the concrete; he’d already moved about five cars down and the red light had suddenly switched to green.
Oh, who are the beggars in your neighborhood… in your neighborhood?
Given the unending in-transit debate about what to do upon encountering mobile mendicancy, the next SONA should address what the hell we’re supposed to do when we encounter blind beggars, street urchins, and the whole lot of poster people for poverty staring at us through the meager tint of our car windows. I mean, since nothing much is being done to get all those vagrant mommas cradling babies and kids peddling sampaguita leis off the streets, then the government should probably slap some sort of passenger-poor protocol on the back pages of local car manuals to tell us whether or not we should do a no-glance double window rap in response so they’ll skip on to the next car or pack a few Snack Packs in our glove compartments for every time we spot these objects of entreaty. Considering what went down with the fellow over at that stoplight, though, I’m guessing grub isn’t the way to a street kid’s heart nowadays.
It’s hard to find goodness in your heart, however, when you witness some seemingly well-fed street kid, ample cheeks and practiced look of despondency, with his arm sticking out for dinero rather than dinner. Charity in this country can get tricky when begging over here has become a profession, what with all the begging regulars — “begulars” I like to call them — working the same streets and stoplights year after year. I still see the same blind dude on the same Meralco Avenue intersection getting spiffier as the years go by: a new shirt here, a new sling pouch there, and if it happens to rain, the guy’s upgraded from garbage bag smock to umbrella. And then there are the traffic tramps you see on the main streets rubbing sullied rags against windshields and then pressing their faces against your window, fogging it up with their heavy breathing to compel you to cough up enough loose change for the clump of rugby they’ll probably snag from their syndicate bosses. And Christ, whose parents didn’t clue them in about the whole street person syndicate business during those close encounters with the needy as kids?
I don’t know if the disheveled, one-legged man by my building works for a syndicate or if these syndicates — whatever they may be — would actually commission that other lame man who crawls across the next street on all fours, jolting passengers who view a hand suddenly graze their side mirror. There are millions of reasons why the aforementioned would resort to scrounging on the streets and I won’t even try to dig up an answer to it all because we’ve got our same ol’ tired theories on why the PH isn’t balanced and how it’s continuously smeared with the indelible muck of politics and greed — what we’ve become accustomed to and learn to expertly tune out in the process, slipping our shades on and turning the volume up on the car radio as the little sampaguita kids whimper outside. To this generation, poverty’s just a part of the urban periphery. Like ubiquitous billboards, pink urinals, and the traffic enforcers who are eager to flag down their color-coded meal tickets.
Where the street kids have no name
What the hell does a person like me know about giving to the poor, anyway? I haven’t done a goddamned outright charitable thing in my life. Even after seven years of toiling in a private school with altruism as its educational fulcrum and required charity as part of its curriculum, the closest I’ve come to undiluted philanthropy after graduation is glancing at the Sparkhope board by the milk thermoses at Starbucks or dropping a few coins into those tin Red Cross cans by the straw dispensers of fast-food outlets right before I trot off to relish my endorphin-saturated cheeseburger.
The donation cans, give-a-book boxes, or whichever paltry reminder of the indigence that exists beyond your neighborhood mall — they’re all quick, negligible fixes for a country that needs a more lasting and intensive fix to the social divide. I’m sure a lot of charitable foundations out there are doing their parts to soak up the homeless through their pranelas of caritas but I think that if the government has got the means to deck the city out with pink urinals, a lot more can probably be done to tidy up every street corner and avenue by sheltering all those derelicts. I’m also sure that there’s a lot more we ourselves can do for others in our own way, like examining whether we’re okay with having two street kids along J. Vargas bust out a dance routine for “awws” and alms instead of hauling ass to school and asking ourselves if we’re all right with that blind, healthy dude on Meralco Avenue choosing begging as an enduring career path.
Now, maybe I don’t blame that kid for scrapping the scraps I’d handed him. As trifling as the experience was, you can call it a case of the “Me” generation experiencing the “Me First” poor firsthand. Right before I sped off towards a life of scheduled pleasures, esoteric pseudo-society blogs, and air-conditioned employment, the sight of that bibingka on the concrete was like a “screw you” to how you, me, people who pass people like him on the streets deal with the poverty that we know all too well yet seem not to give a crap about. It was like the little man was saying, “Are you all going to keep dumping your leftovers on me? Do you think about making lives apart from yours better while you’re swinging your Wii handles or swiping plastic for whatever new object of desire that’s giving you a consumerist stiffy? If not, just hand me some spare change and drive off.” Yet he didn’t need to say anything. We both knew that for every driver who passes through these streets, rolling his window down or turning his head away, the red light’s switch to green means there will always be that drive away.