Why can't they see?

There are millions in need, in real need, wherever you are in this country. These faces stare you in the face day in, day out.

 These are the faces of children out in the street. Dirty, hungry, how many of them have been driven to sniff rugby or to graduate to more dangerous drugs? How many of them have prematurely learned to be street-wise, to engage in petty offenses and then to grow into hardened criminals, despite their tender ages?

 These are the faces of the students who have to walk barefooted or cross flooded areas just to get to their dilapidated classrooms. Not only do their schoolteachers not have enough chalk for each day or enough salary to see their own family through daily. Many students cannot stay long enough in school due to hunger or to lack of funds to see them through their daily school needs.

 Then there are the young faces of the bully and the bullied. Recent news showed how a group of elementary students ganged up on one of their classmates, who ended up dead after having been choked by a very young classmate.

 There are those who attempted to commit suicide this year, in Cebu alone, 180, with 70% of them dead. These are the desperate, the depressed who, like all the rest of the children mentioned earlier, have called for help, for assistance, for concern from anyone who could share their time and attention, and most especially from those whose job it is to extend resources to these needy.

 Only those who choose not to see miss the taong grasa. Their numbers have continued to increase out in the streets of Cebu. Dirtier and more hungry than the dirty and hungry children who are blessed with the company of some family, kin, or friends, these taong grasa are on their own, with just themselves to talk to, with just themselves to live with day in, day out.

 Then, there are those who walk, or bike, or ride to their work. Blessed are they who have work for they will have food for each day? Not necessarily, the workers will vow. How many of them no longer have belts to tighten? How many of them bear the stress and pain of seeing unmet family needs even just for basic three meals per day?

 The workers in the companies, in factories, the drivers out in the street, the vendors in the markets and the farmers in their fields and the fisherfolks out in the sea have shouted themselves hoarse, they have left their farms and walked far to the cities to have their cause and needs plainly visible before those tasked with service for them to no avail. These workers and food producers remain poor, unattended by those who vowed to serve them.

 Beauty pageant winners and beautiful bodies are conspicuously noticed and given far more attention than the genuinely needy. Foreign and rich visitors are driven in limousines, air-conditioned buses while the grieving mourners and the boy scouts had to expose themselves to danger and even death while riding DUMP TRUCKS.

 The homeless are all over. The landless as well. There are the young girls who are peddled for prostitution or domestic labor and battered women clamoring for help.

 All the above – the children, the laborers, the workers, the food producers, the prostituted and battered women- all those who have gone through their lives in unending poverty, they have been shouting their hearts out for decades or some, for centuries even.

 Surely, those with power and wealth, those in the position to help have surely seen the needy with their own eyes? Or have they gone through most of their lives inside ivory towers, tinted vehicles or airplanes, they missed seeing the images of poverty out in the streets, in the farms, in the seas, in the forests and other public places?

 Pray tell. Are the real needs of these real people, and there are millions of these needy far less important than the infrastructures that politicians usually spend most of their pork barrel funds for?

 Oh, if only a law can be passed that no politician can use any public funds for infrastructure, that instead, public funds can only be used directly to uplift the poor and the needy! Can the Filipinos clamor for this basic right to have their money used only for the needy poor, not for useless structures?

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