Kapit sa patalim

I was listening recently to that brilliant scholar Felipe Miranda, poignantly describe our overseas workers — the majority of them women — oppressed and humiliated as victims of that condition called kapit sa patalim. For those who are unfamiliar with the Tagalog term, it describes a drowning man who, in his last, desperate effort to survive, grabs and clings to a blade although that blade will not only harm but kill him for it is a sharp, open razor.

We have come to esteem our overseas workers as heroes and, indeed, they are. According to official statistics, they bring annually $14 billion or even as much as $20 billion — the rest not officially recorded because it reaches us through underground channels.

This vast sum sustains the economy; without it, this nation will collapse — its shopping malls will close, the profligate lifestyle of the rich will cease and thousands upon thousands will definitely starve.

It was very wrong in the first place for the Marcos government to have promoted this diaspora as a means to employ the thousands who finished college. It would have been difficult but correct for the leadership to have hastened national development to absorb the educated unemployed.

We are now reaping the ill effects of this policy in the vast number of dysfunctional families, the induced dependence of lazy Filipinos on the steady remittances abroad.

Those who expected value from the experience of our overseas workers are now disappointed; they had hoped that when these workers return, with their savings, expertise and experience, they would hasten domestic development. It has not been this way — when they return, they revert to the same lethargy and apathy of their kin; they are swallowed back into the deadening culture they had left.

Will there always be the poor among us? They are poor because they are poor; all too often, poverty induces poverty because it is regarded as inevitable. There is in the minds of the destitute their acceptance of their condition, their being “the little people.” They become lethargic, grasping, whining and lazy. We can see these hopeless wrecks in our slums, in our addicts, the drunks, stealing from their neighbors, expecting handouts without realizing that begging in itself is despicable for human dignity is diminished by it. And because these very poor are crass realists and pragmatists, they sell their votes, grab what they can not so much because they don’t know where the next meal will come from but because stealing is not so much a crime as a necessity.

In the last election, a bizarre ploy emerged — the need for the candidates and, in this case, Erap and Manny Villar to avidly seek identity with the downtrodden. Knowing that a third of the country’s 95 million live in poverty, the candidates thought it was necessary to court their votes by being one with them. They claimed that if they could raise themselves from the dung heap, so can the rest who now live in that dung heap. They promised the poor that when they achieve power, they will abolish poverty. Well and good, except that in practice, these elected officials enrich themselves first then forget their promises.

Politicians like the late President Diosdado Macapagal ran for office as “the poor boy from Lubao.” Look at his record — what really did he do to abolish poverty? And his daughter — 10 years that she was in power, and poverty increased rather than diminished even as she supposedly tried to live up to her father’s “legacy.”

The abolition of poverty starts not from a political or economic ideology. It evolves out of a sublime and profoundly moral conviction — this, our leaders have never realized or understood.

Sometime in the early Sixties, the late John Province, PhD, who was then Ford Foundation representative in the Philippines, introduced me to that landmark sociological study of poverty by the American scholar, Oscar Lewis. He lived for months with a Mexican slum family then wrote about that experience. His “ The Children of Sanchez” analyzed via visceral experience the dynamics of the slum. Dr. Province asked me if I’d like to do the same — live in Tondo, then write about it — but I demurred; I had a foreign posting coming: in any case, our own anthropologists, Felipe Landa Jocano, Mary Racelis, Denis Murphy, Aprodicio Laquian confirmed Professor Lewis’ thesis. Basically, it is this: poverty creates a culture that perpetuates itself. But poverty is not irremediable; the slum could well be just a way station.

And this is precisely what needs to be imbibed by the very poor, that poverty is also a mental state.

I always tell those do-gooders, those masochists who wallow in self-pity, that there is nothing honorable about being poor, that poverty is degrading and there is no more humiliating condition for any human being than to be hungry.

Do not romanticize poverty; our overseas workers are this country’s life savers, yes, the unintended heroes but they are just poor Filipinos who have no alternative but to flee. If they are skilled, they do not get the opportunities and rewards here because the social order does not permit them, because this society promotes poverty so that the elites could continue their profligacy — they have hundreds of underpaid workers they can oppress.

Also, the lower classes do not start revolutions. They are the fodder in wars. And even when the revolution or the war is won, they would still be poor. As that eminent statesman William Gladstone said in his time as he passed workers breaking stones on a roadway, “ Ireland will be free, but you will still be breaking stones!”

The Catholic Church opposes the more effective artificial birth control methods but does not accept the responsibility for the poor who get sick, who die because they cannot afford medicines and hospitals. We have this numbing belief that “ the poor will inherit the earth” which we know is absolutely false. We have religious orders which exhort poverty. And we have left thinkers who consider poverty as the intellectual premise for ideological indignation but are actually fascist in their political persuasion. To extol poverty then becomes just another intellectual hypocrisy.

How then can the impoverished extricate themselves from their bondage? How else but to affirm in themselves the tenacious confidence that will unite them in their struggle against injustice — for that is what poverty is — the injustice inflicted on them by their fellow men, and abetted by an unjust government itself.

That so many Filipinos now eat only once a day is a blatant confirmation of the immorality of our people and particularly of our leaders. When I see all those fat and glossy cars in our elite schools, the thousands upon thousands crowding our churches and religious rallies, I realize how dismally our schools and churches have failed. I recall, too, what the late Haydee Yorac once said, that the University of the Philippines College of Law had produced some of the most despicable crooks in government.

Bertolt Brecht once said, “Shouting about injustice hoarsens the voice” — this is a warning to those who write. But then, it is anger that often sustains life itself for when we cease being angry at the injustices around us—we stop living. Kapit sa patalim, after all, is not so tragic a fate.