Cost of living

I GO to Mercury Drug each week, and each time I see these faces, queuing in front of the counter with a look that is both hesitant and indignant but ultimately resigned and begging for some small comfort they know will never come from the pharmacist staring them down.

They stand there, holding a piece of paper in one hand and a worn-down purse (they may as well use a plastic bag) in the other, sad, helpless, like they’re clawing through straws, furious, trying to climb up, though they probably know they’re grabbing at nothing but air. They seem to me like they’re drowning in air.

They’re the poor who, already deep in debt trying to make ends meet with a budget of less than a hundred a day for an oversized, very extended family of 12, has had, by some cruel trick of fate, to deal with a father or a husband or a grandparent who has tuberculosis or an aneurism.

So, they line up in a drugstore with money borrowed from a loan shark or charged against their future salaries, so they can buy that antibiotic or pill that costs as much as a week’s worth of the food they are already in short supply of.

Call me emotional, but I think the biggest lie Big Pharma is making us swallow is that we don’t deserve to live if we can’t pay up because good health – with all the research and marketing that go into it – costs money.

I took my son once for an asthma attack to the emergency room of Makati Med – I think the guys at the hospital call that area the “pit” (or maybe I’m just watching too much of Grey’s Anatomy). As I waited while my son was being treated, I eavesdropped on a conversation between three residents and a frail, small woman sitting on a chair, held up by a pair of oversized slippers.

She was staring blankly into a wall. Her husband was on life support in a nearby cubicle – his lung eaten up by cancer after years of smoking – and the residents were trying to explain to her that while they can keep her husband breathing, there will be no point in doing that because there was no chance he’ll be waking up again anyway.

But she just kept repeating: “Can’t you do anything more? He’s my husband. He’s the only one earning for us.”

Finally, a snooty woman – maybe the head nurse – cut in and told her bluntly and rather crassly, “You won’t be able to afford it if we keep him breathing here.”

There was a time when there were great physicians and chemists who worked there asses off without hardly any compensation, so they could find a cure to a plague or an illness that was decimating mankind. Now, it seems all they do is find a wonder drug so they could earn billions and keep their shareholders happy.

* * *

Business for motley fools like us. I’m no economics expert – I’m a philosophy major, by the way, and I didn’t even graduate – but I’ve been editing business stories for more than a decade that I feel confident enough to cut through the techno-crap that floats around in business sections like this one like weed pollen in the morning.

I’ve made it my vocation to make business stories as understandable as movie gossip to the watchman sitting slack-jawed beneath spotty fluorescent bars deep in the night ringing a random number hoping to hear a light, girly voice at the other end of the line.

Here’s one gobbledygook we can sink our teeth in today. The central bank wants to mop up P50 billion in excess liquidity to keep inflation benign.

Crap, right? Well, that bit of news simply means that the central bank – the demigods who tell banks what to do – thinks there’s too much money floating around that it wants to keep some of it in its vaults, so it won’t drive prices up.

You see, those companies that make products we consume think that when there’s too much money floating around, it’ll be perfectly all right for them to drive their prices up, so they can get a piece of the action.

Of course, fools like us don’t really get to see – much less touch – all that money. The closest thing our dirty hands will ever get to touch it is if we have a relative working abroad who’s sending us all the dollars they earn.

Part of that “excess liquidity” the central bank is talking about are remittances from the country’s huge army of migrant workers. Most of it goes to stocks, bonds and capital that do create new businesses and jobs for us. Eventually, all that money is going to trickle down to us down the food chain. Maybe just enough for a can of sardines, but It’s not a bad thing, really.

What the central bank is just trying to do is protect us from all those greedy bastards trying to filch our already cash-deprived pockets by jacking up the prices of our shampoos, detergent, cell phone load, baby formula and instant noodles.

So, here’s a glass to those boys at the central bank who don’t really get paid all that well but gets a kick out of scaring the living hell out of all the bad guys trying to make our lives even more miserable by telling us we don’t deserve to live because we can’t pay up.

Names

I WAS scrolling through my phone’s contact list, and I was surprised to find at least 12 names there that I don’t recognize. I absolutely have no idea how they got there and who those people are and how have they figured into my life.

There’s this name, Rommel Bolesa, for instance, that I can only guess must’ve been a driver from a car rental firm my old employer once hired for an out-of-town gig or a contact person in a provincial office somewhere.

I guess most of these unrecognizable names are like condoms or napkins: very valuable but are really “for one-time use” only. They were very important in a particular moment in my life, but are now essentially useless.

Yet, somehow, I can’t bring myself to delete them. There’s this nagging thought that one day, maybe by some cruel trick of fate, having these names in my cell phone will save me from some desperate, tragic situation on a boring, Sunday afternoon.

So they stay there, in my phone memory and SIM card, gathering dust, clogging my way to names I frequently use, incubating, waiting for that time when they will become useful again. That time may never come, yet they wait patiently, sitting there with a sinister presence, like a CC camera in a dark parking lot watching for a couple trying to steal some time away from their husbands or wives or trying to escape a drab existence that they desperately want to spice up with a steamy extra-marital affair.

Then there are names that somehow mysteriously vanished. They belong to people I know and who have shared important moments in my life, but I have not kept in touch for a long time: a high school classmate, a close friend now raising a family in America, an old flame.

When nostalgia or a desire to believe I am somebody important and have made something out of my pathetic life kicks in, I get this urge to call or send them a text message, but they’re not there. Gone. Unreachable. Missing and, well, missed. I must’ve deleted them (though I can’t remember for sure) or they must’ve been left behind in an old phone, abandoned, forgotten, left to rot forever.

I have since resorted to tagging names, so I’d know exactly who they represent and how they figure into my life.

I tag them with the institution or organization they represent. Officemates in my hole-in-the-wall office, for instance, are labeled “Chronicle” and then their name. So our quirky, abdominally challenged layout director, for instance, is “Chronicle Elmer A” in my phone, and all those people I came across my old job at San Miguel are “San Miguel John Does” and “San Miguel Jane Does.”

If we are really defined by the people we know – and don’t know – then I guess in a world that is increasingly becoming connected by cell signals, cables and invisible wires, anybody can really sum up a life by the names he or she has on their cell phones, and technology hasn’t changed much really.

Well, maybe now we get to know more people than we used to, before cell phones became as ubiquitous as the air we breathe. The quality of the relationships we keep, however, are very much the same.

There are people we keep for the rest of our lives, a few we’d rather forget, and then there are some we experience for just one brief, special moment, and we wonder where they are and whether we’d ever get to see them again. Then we reach for our phone and scroll down our contact list and we realize that, well, we are all essentially alone in the company of strangers.

Crumbs

IT is one of those big pre-election pitches that are as predictable as the sunrise but whose impact has been as vague and ambiguous as the boundaries that divide life and death.

On Sunday, the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines extolled in a pastoral letter its faithful flock to do whatever they can to prevent cheating and fraud in the mid-term elections this May, where 17,000 positions are up for grabs, including half the seats in the Senate and all seats in the House of Representatives.

The bishops stressed that “many of our current political problems, which have hindered fuller economic development and social justice, especially for the poor, can be traced to unresolved questions concerning the conduct of past elections.”

“As a nation,” they warned, “we cannot afford yet another controversial electoral exercise that further aggravates social distrust and hopelessness.”

The bishops riled over two cases in particular: the “Hello, Garci” scandal that marred the 2004 presidential elections and set off an impeachment case against President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo; and, the P728-million fertilizer fund scam

One archbishop suggests that the mid-term elections will serve as a referendum and provide closure to questions regarding Mrs. Arroyo’s leadership. If the President’s party wins, he argues, then she deserves to stay in office; if the opposition wins, then the people has rejected her.

We agree with the bishops that electoral fraud is a problem that needs to be taken cared of for our nation to really grow, not only economically and politically, but also spiritually.

The situation on the ground, however, isn’t as two-dimensional as the piece of paper a pastoral letter is written on or an archbishop’s simple logic.

Let’s face it. Cheating in this country pays, and it pays because it’s easy. It’s easy because when it comes to deciding what names to write on a ballot, the question ultimately is: What have you done for me lately?

Visit the Manila city council, and you’ll get a clearer picture of how politics is won and lost in this country. Councilors working the stands and the lounge – shaking hands, doling out loose change, approving requests for financial assistance – have a better chance of getting re-elected than those working the podium.

One alderman’s tactic has been to go around his district at night looking for a wake. He’s just following his instincts. He knows precisely that a P500 plucked from his own pocket and given to a grieving family will get him farther than any bombastic rhetoric about the cancer that is eating into the moral fiber of our society.

Crumbs rain down on the masses during an election year, and these crumbs often translate into votes.

Cheating feeds into the desperation that poverty breeds. When faced with a moral dilemma as to whether he should accept a P500 bill and vote a candidate he dislikes or walk away and vote according to his conscience, what do you think a jobless father of seven young children, one of whom is down with dengue in a local hospital, would do?

It’s easy to extol the masses with something like, “Let us regain our dignity.” But by God, be realistic. You can’t eat dignity. When the dilemma is between dying of hunger or selling out to get crumbs from an opportunistic politician, the choice is pretty obvious.

Are we being defeatists? No. We merely wish to point out that when we proselytize to the masses about doing the right thing, we have to make sure we fully grasp the gravity of the depravity and desperation they experience.

Crumbs

IT is one of those big pre-election pitches that are as predictable as the sunrise but whose impact has been as vague and ambiguous as the boundaries that divide life and death.

On Sunday, the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines extolled in a pastoral letter its faithful flock to do whatever they can to prevent cheating and fraud in the mid-term elections this May, where 17,000 positions are up for grabs, including half the seats in the Senate and all seats in the House of Representatives.

The bishops stressed that “many of our current political problems, which have hindered fuller economic development and social justice, especially for the poor, can be traced to unresolved questions concerning the conduct of past elections.”

“As a nation,” they warned, “we cannot afford yet another controversial electoral exercise that further aggravates social distrust and hopelessness.”

The bishops riled over two cases in particular: the “Hello, Garci” scandal that marred the 2004 presidential elections and set off an impeachment case against President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo; and, the P728-million fertilizer fund scam

One archbishop suggests that the mid-term elections will serve as a referendum and provide closure to questions regarding Mrs. Arroyo’s leadership. If the President’s party wins, he argues, then she deserves to stay in office; if the opposition wins, then the people has rejected her.

We agree with the bishops that electoral fraud is a problem that needs to be taken cared of for our nation to really grow, not only economically and politically, but also spiritually.

The situation on the ground, however, isn’t as two-dimensional as the piece of paper a pastoral letter is written on or an archbishop’s simple logic.

Let’s face it. Cheating in this country pays, and it pays because it’s easy. It’s easy because when it comes to deciding what names to write on a ballot, the question ultimately is: What have you done for me lately?

Visit the Manila city council, and you’ll get a clearer picture of how politics is won and lost in this country. Councilors working the stands and the lounge – shaking hands, doling out loose change, approving requests for financial assistance – have a better chance of getting re-elected than those working the podium.

One alderman’s tactic has been to go around his district at night looking for a wake. He’s just following his instincts. He knows precisely that a P500 plucked from his own pocket and given to a grieving family will get him farther than any bombastic rhetoric about the cancer that is eating into the moral fiber of our society.

Crumbs rain down on the masses during an election year, and these crumbs often translate into votes.

Cheating feeds into the desperation that poverty breeds. When faced with a moral dilemma as to whether he should accept a P500 bill and vote a candidate he dislikes or walk away and vote according to his conscience, what do you think a jobless father of seven young children, one of whom is down with dengue in a local hospital, would do?

It’s easy to extol the masses with something like, “Let us regain our dignity.” But by God, be realistic. You can’t eat dignity. When the dilemma is between dying of hunger or selling out to get crumbs from an opportunistic politician, the choice is pretty obvious.

Are we being defeatists? No. We merely wish to point out that when we proselytize to the masses about doing the right thing, we need to be sure we fully grasp the gravity of the depravity and desperation they experience.

Forgiving and forgetting

YOU can feel it in the air: the mid-term elections. The crackdown on opposition bailiwicks, a continuous barrage of news releases about how life is so much better now, a parade of the government’s achievements in the war on terror, the dirt-digging and mudslinging.

On the ground, politicians are much kinder now, more charitable. Ask, and you shall receive. They are much-more approachable; they smile more often and they ditch the fancy suits, Rolex watches and blinding blings. The cordon sanitaires are lifted, the bodyguards melt away in the background, and our candidates seem to know each and everyone – especially the poor, sweat-soaked, hardly educated hoi polloi – like they were long-lost brothers. The baby-kissing, yes, that undying cliché of political barnstorming, is now a ubiquitous, eye-straining spectacle.

While an election year always brings out the best in our politicians, it, sadly, also lures out the worse in us, voters.

We are a very forgiving race, so much so that while they hang dictators and tyrants in Iraq, here we elect them to Congress and heap praises on their spawns. Small favors, especially from somebody important or famous, elate us no end and often cloud our good judgment. A mere visit to our humble home or a handshake from the town mayor or someone we see everyday on TV is sometimes enough to make us conclude that this person may have a good soul, after all, and deserves to be elected in office again. Never mind if this same person has, while in office, turned a deaf ear to our pleas for help when we were looking for jobs or with our sewer problems and who made us wait in long queues and for long hours just waiting for the signature of a curmudgeon of a minion of his.

Forgiving is a virtue, but forgiving without learning anything from the experience – to just forgive and forget – is a fault.

Remember that senator who danced while the nation burned in disgust over her and her allies’ attempts to railroad the impeachment trial of the sitting president? She has humbly asked for our forgiveness and is again taking a crack at a Senate seat. Should we forgive her? Of course. Should we put her back to the Senate? Of course not.

Let us not be fooled again.

After a long slump, the Philippine economy is once more on the rebound. Our peso is stronger against the dollar, so we can buy more with it. Money from all over is coming to our shores, perking up the stock market, giving local companies a boost and creating jobs. The government is finally saving enough to be able to trim its debs and pay for roads, bridges, power plants, irrigation facilities and other infrastructure the country needs to reel in more investments.

Some of the benefits of this recent economic spurt are slowly trickling down to us down the economic pyramid. Oil prices are down, our electric bills are lower and credit rates are falling.

Though thanks in some part to an economic slump in the United States that is again spreading American wealth to the rest of the world, our rebound won’t be possible without men who, despite the odds, are laying the foundation that is making it possible for the Philippines to partake of the prosperity now sweeping much of Asia. Men like Gary Teves, the guy at finance who has been adept at reining in spending and improving the government’s revenue even if, at times, it means pushing unpopular measures like the value-added tax. He doesn’t do what he does with as much fanfare as a Wowowee! episode, which is why he’s not topping any political surveys, but truth is, here’s a guy who really deserves a seat in the Senate.

So come May, when we again troop to our polling precincts, we pray that we are not going to write on our ballots the names of people who will again mess it all up for all of us. Not the ex-senator (who thankfully will finally get some time behind bars) who made the Philippines miss the economic boom of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s with his military adventurism. Not the mutineer (who thankfully is still in jail) with the messianic complex and who is so deeply in love with his self-worth. Not the homophobic actor whose real achievement is marrying one of the country’s most desirable women. Not the former vice president who can’t even think straight.

There are still a few good men out there, and it’s not difficult to spot them. All we have to do is look closer.