WINDOWS
I would like to congratulate JJCICSI for this comprehensive research and assessment done in the most challenging of times. Cf. http://bit.ly/Lights-and-Shadows-May-Aug-2020. Thanks to Jing Karaos for great summary of the research. Thanks also to Ed Colmenares SJ and Johanne Arceo for their reflections.
My reaction is a comment on three areas that crisscrossed several categories in the report. The objective is to use one particular social event to serve as a window to the larger whole. A writer once said: “The role of education is to turn our mirrors into windows” – to make us see beyond. Three windows: ang ayuda, ang tokhang, at ang pagsasaka at pagkalinga.
1. “Ayuda”: Window to Duterte’s Governance
The report says that 5M families receive P8000 at the first trance of the Social Amelioration Program (SAP). There were supposed to be a second and third trances. There were also food subsidies from DSWD whose main office ironically closed shop at the start of the pandemic.
But how does this look really on the ground? The first window to Duterte's governance is the list of beneficiaries. Where does it come from? From NCSO – the last census was done five years ago. From the Barangay? That is a list of political allies for election purposes. From the purok leader? That is hastily done list of kamag-anak and kumare’s leaving many on the sides. What are its consequences? You see long queues at the barangay hall under the rain or noonday sun up to the wee hours of the night. The homeless, indigenous peoples and beggars whose names do not appear on the barangay list go home with nothing.
The “list” (or lack of it) is a window to the corruption and incompetence of the bureaucratic approach to government service that does not value the human person as person. It is a window not just of the Duterte administration but to the present populist and democratic social arrangements worldwide. While big neoliberal institutions failed their citizens, what comes to the fore during the pandemic are autonomous self-organized groups, local and personal networks, counter-hegemonic solidarities of care and mutual support.
What comes to my mind is a courageous group of 50 BEC women-leaders in Payatas who have risked their lives and safety to distribute rice, pandesal, milk, etc to their neighbors every day for six months now since the lockdown. Because they live in these spaces all their lives, these mothers know which breadwinners lost work, who are the most vulnerable, who needs food right now. I asked this guide question in our reflection session: “After three months and with all the risks of being contaminated, why are you still here? What made you stay?” One mother summarized her group’s sentiments: “What made us stay? It is Jesus’ command to feed the hungry. For how can we continue to live when people are dying?”
These mothers provide a stinging critique to incompetent and corrupt government, even to NGOs who have become bureaucratic, as well as to complacent church people paralyzed by fear and retreated to the safety of their homes. Here, lay-centered and women-led groups motivated by their faith alone incarnates what the CST has only theorized – the principles of participation, subsidiarity and solidarity – in all its emotional nearness, felt caring and concreteness of everyday action.
2. “Tokhang”: Window to the Rule of Impunity
The war on drugs which started four years ago still continue during the pandemic. Human Rights Watch reported 50% increase in EJK during police operations excluding riding in tandem. In Payatas alone, we had 3-4 cases and there are several others whom we have not yet documented because of the lockdown.
The war on drugs is just a window to the rule of impunity, disregard for human lives and human rights in the Duterte administration. The politics of fear tells us: “We are on the state of war. Obey or you will die.” This militarized approach to the pandemic is sadly mimicked in our offices, in our churches, etc. The IATF is alarmed with the rising mental health issues almost without knowing that their approach reinforces this in our homes and in our minds.
The impunity leads to what I call the inversions of the Duterte administration. They do violence to the protesters who are hungry at San Roque but absolve the abuses of Sinas, Roque and Duque. They absolve Pemberton but keep Leila de Lima in prison. They close ABS-CBN but eagerly welcome DITO. It is the same impunity logic from the start: They kill the poor drug user but leave Peter Lim and other drug lords go scot-free. While the gospel “inversions” (Luke is famous for this) favor excluded and the weak, Duterte’s inversions favor the oligarchs and the powerful, notwithstanding his protestations to the contrary. And all these are happening during the pandemic when people are dying.
Pope Francis reminds us that the pandemic should not be used as an excuse not to respect human dignity which is the cornerstone principle of CST: “While we work for the cure of a virus that affects everyone without distinction, faith urges us to work seriously and actively to fight indifference in the face of violations of human dignity” (Pope Francis, August 2020) – something which Duterte is determined to neglect with or without the virus.
3. “Ang Pagsasaka at Pagkalinga”: Our Window of Hope
The only bright spot in the pandemic is the growth of agriculture, the report says. The once forgotten farmer doubly marginalized by land conversion and rice tariffication, among others, became the source of our salvation. When we are enamored with large cities, big malls, giant businesses, it takes COVID-19 to deconstruct that and tell us that “small is in fact beautiful”, says a small book of the same title by Schumacher I read long time ago. Small is beautiful: the small talipapa nearby, the small grocery by the roadside, the small community which is self-sustaining. The personal relations and care in these small communities serve as our windows of hope in the midst of the pandemic.
I am back to where I started: the paradigm of care (pagkalinga) as antidote to fear. In Laudato Si, Pope Francis speaks less of the theology of stewardship and talks more of the paradigm of care in our relationship with others but also of the rest of creation. Its subtitle affirms this – Care for our Common Home. Our relationship with nature is beyond manager-steward transaction regardless of how responsible the steward is. The deeper truth is that we are in a caring relation with God's creation. We care for them; they take care of us.
In the end, let me go back to the women-leaders of Payatas. Once, they were made to scavenge our garbage in order to survive. They have actually become the “wastes of capital” themselves, to quote the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. But these women-scavengers are now turning the tables on global capitalism, and start producing their own vegetables, their own food, their own organic farms in the meager lands which they ironically borrowed.
They wake up each morning, and work and share their stories in front of these growing veggies. And you can only imagine the hope and beauty, the caring and joy it brings them.
Daniel Franklin E. Pilario, C.M.
St. Vincent School of Theology
Adamson University
danielfranklinpilario@yahoo.com
09.12.2020
See recording: