Drowsy

At last, policy makers are awakened into the reality that currently bites the Philippines. Economic planners are trimming growth targets. It isn’t these targets, however, that ordinary Filipinos find mind-boggling. The planners and policy movers have always had a penchant for making targets anyway, elevating the effort to the level of a sport. It looks, though, that they had been making plans either in slumber or in a half-awakened state. Being in climate-controlled luxury cars and excellently airconditioned homes and offices can, indeed, induce a narcotic, numbing, and trance-like effect.

The ordinary Pinoy finds sick humor in television ads and cinema ads where the president of his country is seen smiling from ear to ear (to match a professionally done make-up and expertly coiffed crowning glory that projects a beaming leader) in cross-fade frames along with animated graphs and statistical figures that visualize a smiling, swimming, and swooning economic upturn (constant and consistent) in the past few months. Along with these images are a series of shots of government institutions that have supposedly been furiously addressing, albeit just recently, the country’s economic blight.

To the ordinary Pinoy, this is not only sickening; it makes his heart sink. But because Filipinos are wont to just laugh off their problems (probably, out of an attitude of being resigned to the fact that is, in turn, an after-effect of centuries-long subservience to colonial rule), the sickening images are merely taken as sick humor. Those images and statistics are lost on the ordinary Filipino because from the time he opens his eyes in the morning till the minute he rests his weary body at night, he knows a different set of facts.

He only knows lower-digit numbers in his economic realities, not ones that can be exponentially configured into statistics. Being destitute, he does not know that far.

Long before the price of rice went up, the ever-dependable instant noodles have also become staple food for poor Filipinos. A pack of instant noodles comes at about 5 pesos. A poor family of five people will have roughly about four packs a day. The taxicab driver will have to ask his passengers for a few extra bucks additional to the metered fare because it has become impossible for him to recoup his gasoline expenses. To the passenger, this means the equivalent of 30 to 40 pesos to show his generosity. Many primary and high school students, in both the countryside and urban poor areas, are forced to quit school because their families can hardly come up with financial requirements needed to sustain schooling. The school I.D. and other seemingly necessary requirements will come up to around 200 pesos more for low-income families.

While the country’s economic planners speak in terms of inflation, export, import, Dubai crude oil prices, and strong peso, the ordinary Pinoy can only utter the price of rice, price of canned sardines, price of instant noodles, cost of public jeepney fare, additional financial requirements in public schools that are supposed to give free education, and the ridiculously escalating price of gas partly due to an imposed 12% expanded value-added tax over and above the ridiculously escalating cost of foreign oil.

It would do a world of good if all Filipinos call a spade a spade. But I am not sure which is more expedient for the sake of having a unified country: for the poor to understand economic terminology or for the ones in power and authority to have their ear to the ground.