After browsing through with this column, I can't help but repost it here (without permission, but with due enthusiasm and understood permission from its writer) to put emphasis on the same line of views that I share. I'm very keen on adopting articles, ensuring that they are in lined with my persuations and set of beliefs, at the time being and this is one perfect and simple example. Given the undeniably painful genocide inflicted on the Filipino people via the rice shortage, we simply cannot ignore the glaring reality of having corruption in both ends of that seemingly futile crisis in the country's staple food. As I put it in my status messages (YM) recently, a simple equation for a natural method of genocide is, Corruption + Globalization = RICEssion. And given the scenario stated herein, I can't help but to rethink again of a fishy rollercoaster ride on the crisis itself, to redirect the attention of the people from the corruption scandals that consistently hound GMA's administration. I won't be elaborating more on this, I still have to buy rice for lunch.
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Theres The Rub
"A pickpocket or snatcher is cornered in Quiapo or Cubao and he is beaten black and blue by an irate crowd. Why then do we not react the same way to thieves in government?"
The rice crisis may yet do something for us. That is to give a face to corruption. That is to make us grasp the crushing weight of corruption. That is to make us see that corruption kills.
For several years now, I’ve written about a problem we’ve always had. That is problem of why we are angry at petty thieves but indifferent to big-time ones.
We do not lack for violent feelings against thieves. Whether it’s the Tagalog word “magnanakaw,” or the more explosive Visayan word “kawatan,” it carries with it the weight of contempt. The “violent feelings” is often literal. A pickpocket or snatcher is cornered in Quiapo or Cubao and he is beaten black and blue by an irate crowd. Half the time he cheats death only by the skin of his teeth. We do loath magnanakaw and kawatan, and we punish them with the harshness their crime deserves.
Why then do we not react the same way to thieves in government? Political and Economic Risk Consultancy has classified us as the most corrupt country in Asia for the last two years, and yet we do not seem sufficiently roused by it. The national broadband network (NBN) scandal has just unfolded before our eyes, the size of the “bukol” [bulge] or what is being stolen from us running into billions of pesos, and yet we do not seem sufficiently incensed by it. Of course, we’ve expressed our indignation and held rallies over it, but at the end of the day we’ve done nothing about it comparable to beating up a pickpocket or snatcher within an inch of his life.
The explanation I’ve come up with for this behavior consists of two things. One, the bigger the theft, the more abstract it becomes. Snatching a woman’s purse is immediate and hits us in the guts. Stealing a billion pesos is remote and hits us in no particular place. Snatching a purse is theft. Stashing a billion pesos is—a bank transaction.
Two is that the bigger the theft, the more we imagine we are not the victim. Someone snatches a woman’s purse and we join others in chasing the snatcher, feeling victimized ourselves. A public official steals a billion pesos and we shrug our shoulders, feeling the crime is against the residents of Timbuktu. We do not see that corruption is just a fancy way of saying, “They’re goddamn stealing our money from us!”
The rice crisis offers an opportunity to educate the public in this respect. It offers an opportunity to show a hungry populace that corruption is just a fancy way of saying, “They’re goddamn stealing our food from us!”
This opportunity comes not least from government’s own efforts to make thieves a special object of hate by the public. That is what the warnings against hoarders and the periodic raids of grain warehouses are meant to do. It is meant to show that hoarders are magnanakaw and kawatan who are completely monstrously plucking the food from the mouths of the hungry. Of course, it is also meant to show that government is heroically trying to save the public from them.
It is a huge gamble. Government is obviously banking on the principle above that the small is easily seen and the big is not, that petty thievery directly harms us while epic thievery does not, that things like hoarding rice make people hungry while things like the NBN do not. It’s a dangerous ploy, and one that’s bound to explode in government’s face.
That is so because the rice, or food, crisis is no ordinary one. It is quite literally a gut issue, “malapit sa bituka” [close to the gut], as we say. It is a matter of life and death. Of course, lack of classrooms is a matter of life and death too, but that is too subtle to be appreciated by the poor whose lives revolve around more urgent needs. Lack of medicines, or costly medicines, is a matter of life and death too, but not everyone is sick at the same time and in desperate need of them. It’s the lack of food, or worse having food but not being able to afford it, that is a matter of life and death and affects everyone at the same time. That is especially so since this crisis is not a temporary or cyclical one. Thanks to government’s insane policy of importing rice instead of producing it presumably because it’s cheaper, that crisis threatens to be one of untold length and severity.
You are waiting your turn in a long line under a smoldering sun to buy a kilo of rice, you are going to feel personally victimized by all thieves, whether those are the thieves that hoard rice in their secret granaries or the thieves that hoard cash from the “kaban ng bayan” [public coffers] in their secret pockets. If the hypocrisy of threatening small rice traders with imprisonment and promising big crooks with aggrandizement doesn’t immediately strike you, you can count on the NGOs, the farmers’ groups, and everyone who stand aghast at this cheekiness to help you see it.
Frankly, I don’t know why those of us who fulminated against the NBN and Malacañang distributing half a million pesos to bishops and congressmen on Palace grounds have not yet mounted a campaign to show how those sums alone translate into the number of farmlands that could have had irrigation, the quantity of seeds that could have been made available to farmers, the amount of subsidy that could have allowed government to buy dear from local farmers and sell cheap to consumers. I don’t know why we have not yet mounted a campaign to show that if the impact of hoarding by unscrupulous traders has been to raise rice prices by so much, then the impact of all the crooks returning the people’s money to the people would be to lower rice prices by so much. I don’t know why we have not yet mounted a campaign to show how corruption is the worst form of hoarding there is: it does not just hit Juan de la Cruz in his head and heart, it hits him in his stomach, it does not harm “other people” it harms us.
I don’t know why we haven’t yet mounted a campaign to show corruption kills.
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Reference: PDI
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