Strangers in a strange land
The children were searching for an appropriate metaphor for all these. The drive to school holds them for 20 minutes in traffic that crawls through a bridge and then all the way to the school gate. Here, the driver looks forward to cars that drive themselves so he may be able to concentrate more fully on reading the papers or on the family conversation which ensues.
The theorizing is all about the unfolding pork barrel scam. Even the kids are asking about it. And of course it was the father’s role to give them sufficient background. And since the background is historical, stretching all the way to when we copied the government of the United States to construct our own, then a lecture seemed imminent. Which moved the eldest child to give fair warning, disinclined as he was to long lectures before his first class of the morning. And perhaps he was right. It makes little sense to understand this issue from a rational perspective. Reason requires prior knowledge of all pertinent information. And what do we really know?
Now that Janet Lim Napoles is safely in jail, perhaps we may now know more. Before her day in court everything was really just conjecture. Every reading was really only guessing, more metaphysical than material. Still, in the absence of anything more concrete, we are allowed to read figuratively and see things the way an artist or a poet might see them.
The children wondered if perhaps our congressmen and senators are really aliens. They did not wonder if they were aliens from a different country, perhaps Spain or the Americas, perhaps even China. They wondered: Could they be aliens from another planet?
Yes, they have been watching too much History channel, too much “Ancient Aliens”. But the question does make sense. In a country with so many who are poor, how could they do what they did?
Such an ability to take away from poor people millions of pesos of tax money specifically designed for them would seem the ability only of those who feel absolutely no empathy for ordinary folks; folks who live in plywood boxes in the slums of the city fringes; folks who brave the seasonal flood, the daily approach of starvation, folks who serve, doing odd hours in rich men’s homes or hotels, washing dishes or driving cars and buses; who return wearily home in the dead of every night bringing with them a few pesos to feed their children who must be sent to school to escape all these.
Who looks down on folks like these? They, from their alien spacecrafts up in the penthouse condominium near the stars, near Orion’s belt, praying for their God’s return. They must live forever, and never fear death, these aliens who seem capable of doing what ordinary folk would be afraid to do for fear of heaven’s or men’s wrath. For they have been caught running away with another’s cell phone. Which only landed them eventually before a judge who gave them life, without parole. Still, for many of them, jail was at least better than the slums.
The aliens, whenever they are sent to jail, are sent to air-conditioned cells or to government hospital rooms where they can serve their terms in comfort as befits their stations in life, inside the scheme of this planet’s hierarchies. Aliens live upstairs. Regular folks stay down here to go about their lives. Which ordinarily is not too bad. And look how happy they are. Even in the worst floods, they still swim and laugh, and smile to the camera.
The aliens too. They laugh to themselves. This is the best planet to be in. And of all the countries on the face of this planet, this particular country, where children swim in septic flood waters, smiling to the rest of the world. Happy even in the worst of times.
And were it a question of their pork barrel stolen from them by aliens at the Congress of this singular Philippine Republic, how many of them, the poor, really complain? Not too many. How many of them really care? Not too many. The ones who complain the loudest are those who are better off. As is only appropriate, some say. Since only they, make sense of anything that happens here. Which only moves us to ask ourselves: Are we also aliens here? What planets, what galaxies, what unnamed group of stars do we really come from?
