Bonding times

Immediately after a storm, the air somehow feels cleaner and people who leave the shelter of their battered homes have some compulsion to engage others in conversation, recounting what everyone who has gone through the storm obviously must have also experienced. So their talk is mostly about the strong winds, the uprooted acacias, the rising floods, the hurtling G.I. sheets, the brownout, the lack of water for cooking and drinking and the general miserableness of it all.

Yet, no one appears to be really miserable. The bright sun picks up the people’s spirits and one gets the impression that everyone is picking up the pieces of whatever the storm might have broken up and mercilessly cast aside. People, it seems, only need to talk and they desperately need to talk with each other.

After the violent Labor Day demonstration – dare one call it the Second Quarter Storm? – many Filipinos appear deeply concerned about getting together and talking about what had transpired when many of the poor in Metro Manila threw caution to the winds and for almost eight hours, with their rocks, improvised clubs, some say knives and molotovs and perhaps one or two sumpaks, dared the State with its truncheons, tear gas, armalites, water cannons and APC’s to mix it up with them.

At the end of that laboriously long day, peace and order prevailed, even as poverty and disillusionment continued.

A week after, numerous citizens – some with pedigreed backgrounds – have come out of their sheltered lives and seriously tried to figure out what had driven the demonstrators to such fury. Some who have worked closely with the poor for years anguished much and self-recriminations among them were not uncommon. That one could have tried to help the poor for so long, so dedicatedly, and still be the focus of their contempt – how can one understand this except as a gross failure in one’s personal ability to communicate with the poor?

From so many with comfortable lifestyles who got the scare of their lives that Monday morning, fear became the progressive force compelling them to see the poor not as mere objects of occasional charity but as forced investments in their social security. Could this primitive fear and its partner pragmatism be replaced by a superior sense of human compassion and enable the currently fearful to image the poor as legitimate members of a progressively inclusive rather than persistently exclusive human family?

Many of the poor who clashed with the forces of the State, suffered their bludgeons and became bloodied tenants of their dungeons have temporarily taken to quietly licking their wounds and – in this quieter frame of mind – have allowed reason to inform their passion rather than having their passion inflame their reason. Sensing the well-off’s apprehension about another social explosion, many of the poor appear willing to test whether this concern might incline those well-off to support truly pro-poor initiatives in this country.

The dominant mood at the moment is to engage everyone in productive dialogue. What is here contemplated by our people – poor and non-poor alike – excludes ritualistic talks that leave everyone feeling robbed in the end. What they clearly demand are candid explorations of how we – even those of us who may appear to be mortal enemies – could come to share a stake in the establishment of enduring social justice in the Philippines.

At this point in time, so soon after the violence of Labor Day and perhaps precisely because of the public suspicion that last May First was no more than a preview of what the next quarter storm could be, we Filipinos feel such a terrible need for bonding. After all, only by being bonded can this nation really get anywhere.

Somewhere in this newspaper today is the extensive survey data which underpin the thoughts expressed in this column. Pulse Asia’s May Day survey, co-sponsored and materially supported by The Philippine STAR, was conducted last May 4, 2001 and polled 300 representative Metro Manilans 18 years old and above. It would be a pity if the public sentiments expressed by these respondents were treated as election-related musings and no more. Yet another window of opportunity for national bonding would then have closed to us. And our people – windowless and hopeless – must claw their way out or suffocate.