Friday, January 30, 2004
The Coming ApocalypseJust a moment ago, Jong tells me in the middle of a meeting, “Did you know that it’s already 58 pesos to the dollar?”—and since I haven’t been watching television or reading newspapers religiously for quite some time on principle, I give her the requisite register of shock:
“What?!” Somewhere deep inside me, whatever was left of hope for the country collapses into Jell-O. And yet every day I wake up to this feeling of cancer spreading throughout the archipelago—politics gone desperately awry, hopes dashed without sight of resurrection, and a pessimism that is catching, more potent than any flu.
Jong laughs at my shock. “
Of course not. I’m joking,” she says, but then ends with this: “But it’s going to
be.”
Then we looked at each other’s eyes, and
knew.
It’s already the end of January, but predictions for the new year are still coming in. They all come bearing the smell of pig sweat, a nervous aroma that is harbinger for dreadful things to come. I have not been hopeful for the Philippines for some time now. Dreams and prospects here have become a dime a dozen, and come with quick expiration dates. Earlier in the year, the columnist Conrado de Quiros, writing for his column in the
Philippine Daily Inquirer, “penned” what could be the most controversial article in his career—an essay that begins with “What to expect in the coming years with President Fernando Poe Jr. and Vice President Noli de Castro…,” only to lead to an entire blank space. And that was its message.
What indeed to expect? A nothingness like slow death.
Yet dying a slow death is easy. Take just one “tiny” problem our country, faces for example: our debt. All a slow death ever really takes is the mere fact of our birth as Filipinos—a legacy as astounding as the sum of the debt our country has incurred over the years. In the name of pursuing progress, we borrow—a common enough thing among the nations of the worlds to do. Nothing surprising about that, until one starts computing off the impact of a quagmire we are all aware exists in our lives, but invisible by virtue of denial. Of the last count, our total national debt fluctuates between $40 to $60 billion, which is roughly P3,300,000,000,000—an amount
so staggering it cannot even contain the deepest of our fiscal nightmares. Thus, every day, hundreds of newly-born Filipinos are ushered into a stark reality that is theirs by birthright: each of us come into the world about P40,000 already deeper into debt—the amount embedded into our skin like a rash—if we are to approportion the grand total of what must be paid among our 80 million people, including all our babies and children. But in a country that is more than half teetering on the brink of destitution, the amount is bloody. Impossible. How do we even begin to pay?
But it is much too easy to end all these talks of paying up our national debt by making true the one solution we can really have. All it takes is guts, an iron stomach, and the capacity to regress—minus our whining and possible regrets—from our everyday sense of what it is to be human and live as one.
Sell everything. Sell the scar in your brow, and sell the sweat off your skin. Sell your self. Sell your house, sell your car, sell your brother’s motorcycle, and your mom’s dentures. Sell sleep, sell waking. Give up electricity and get used to going about life without tap water at one’s immediate disposal. Stop going to school, and do not even dare to dream, unless this too can be for sale. Sell your rights to have all these. Liquidate all those farmlands and buildings and paintings and jewelry into cash. Sell paper. Sell the ink on those papers. Sell my opinion on this blog. Sell everything. Do all that can be done to contribute to a hypothetical piggy bank to save us all. Sell the wallpaper and your rags, sell your cellphone, sell your clothes. Do not even think of packing your bags and going away to live in some slum and live the simple life. Those, too, are for sale. Sell the slums, sell the zipper in your packing bags, sell the potholes in the roads, sell the stones and the pebbles that stub your toes as you walk barefoot into some unsellable corner and surrender to the life that’s possible if all of us have the national will to purge ourselves of this scourge of owing everybody else everything else, get the cash, and live the (un)reality of being, finally, debt-free.
Which is to say, really, that it takes herculean efforts and the strangest and toughest of will to solve a problem that might have to remain unsolved for a very long time. Because the only possible solution,
aside from the possibility of reneging on our liabilities the way Brazil brazenly did a few years back, is also a death sentence, a case of the cure being worse than the disease. The impossibility of the whole thing seems the only thing there is. How does anyone ever really solve a problem like mounting debt, the interest of which we cannot even pay by the skin of our teeth? The answer reminds me of a line from a song from a famous musical: “How do you catch a wave upon the sand? How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?”
How indeed?
In the end, I can provide no concrete answers here (nor do I really want to), and all I can really have is an opinion that is itself a mere shadow of the volumes of opinions that have already been shed into the issue. Our sadness has become tiresome. Even boring. We have surrendered to the quagmire.
Because there can only be futility. And not that I am incapable of hope.
Hope is beside the point. The red ink on our country’s ledger will not erased by any amount of hope that’s possible to exude. Nor erased by the ink spilled on this paper. We all live lives already mired in fiscal tragedy without redemption, we might just as well take it easy and breathe.
Or can we.
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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