A Facebook shout out kept ringing in my partially deaf left
ear these past few weeks. I’ve
decided to expound on this in the hope the ringing would stop.
It’s actually a rather lengthy shout out. In it, I stated that a post that a few of my
FB friends had reposted, thus, I’ve repeatedly seen and read for a couple of
weeks, was all a crap. The said post
claimed that “the rich stays rich by
spending like poor. The poor stays poor by spending like rich”. Initially, I did not pay attention to it but
repeatedly seeing and reading is another story.
That statement is, to me, the most anti-poor of all the
craps I’ve heard and read, so far. What
I can’t believe was, it was reposted by friends who most likely came from poor
families, like me. Well, we may no longer
be poor—they as teachers and me as a non-teaching personnel in the education
department, we’re middle class; lower middle class to be precise. What added to my disbelief is how easily they
appeared to have fallen for such crap.
For one, we’ve mostly spent more than four years in universities. Thus, we’re supposed to know better.
But unlike me—I’d spent 13 years, inclusive of my leaves of
absence, to earn my 4-year undergraduate degree—they either have finished their
Master’s, if not their PhDs, or have earned more post-graduate units.
What’s more puzzling? Well, most likely these people, like me,
can trace their class origin from either the peasant or the working class. How easy it is for them to betray their class
origin?
Well, that’s pardonable.
Unlike me, they were never exposed to left ideologies, thus, they never
developed their class consciousness. More
so, they never learned and acquired better socio-economic and political tools
of analysis. Of course, others would
assert that prior actual and concrete immersion in the harsh realities of the
Philippine society is the BETTER TEACHER than the intellectual debates and
discussions in colleges and universities to see the situation differently, understand it and
not gullibly fall prey to such crap.
Do they really believe that the likes of the Sys, the
Villars, the Gokongweis, the Zobels, the Razons, the Tan Caktiongs, the Tans,
and the Angs, or even just the Ramoses, the Estradas, the Macapagal-Arroyos,
the Aquinos, and the Dutertes, can spend, buy things, like us? Or, even the likes of the usually pretentious
nouveau riche?
No matter how hard I
try to stretch my imagination, I cannot conjure up a picture of any member of
the eight (8) richest families in the country or any member of the presidential
families queuing and buying and eating cheap NFA rice. What more, brave the wet, often time slippery
and stinky, markets to buy the cheapest fish and meat cuts? The “nouveau poor”, on the other hand, would
most likely opt to save the minimum jeepney fares and go to street corner talipapas where said saved fares could
be an additional gram of fish, meat or vegetable to bring home.
If I can’t imagine the middle class, like us, shifting
through the trash from fast food chains’ kitchens for food that our families
can eat, the more that I cannot the rich?
But as the situation worsens, expect this despicably dehumanizing
adaptive measure of the dirt-poor to be adopted too by the not-so-poor among
the poor just to survive.
Why am I making a lot of fuzz—okay, ranting too much—on
this?
This, often times, angry—and now sinister—old man believes
that this is mind-conditioning. By who?
Who else but the rich and their cohorts. Why?
The rich wants the poor to think that it’s them that caused
their own wretchedness. And the various
social media that the former have practically created and controlled come in
handy to help spread this misinformation and many other lies.
And as the poor that comprises the majority that occupies
the base of the socio-demographic pyramid believes that they are to blame for
their sorry lot, the prevailing status quo will remain unshaken and will last
longer than the pyramids that ancient Egyptians and Mayans had built centuries ago.
The reign and domination of the 1% over the 99% will remain entrenched as long as the gullible poor and their
class-allies are not awakened from their lethargic gullibility and slumber and take all misinformation and lies they read and hear hook, line and sinker. (30)
