Month: January 2021

governance

2020 Ended at the Greenhills Hostage Crisis

January 26, 2021 by
2

I am writing this on the 1st of January, 2021, to be sure that the chaotic and fickle-minded 2020 had no more punches to throw. I have conjectured that while we had to trudge through 365 days last year, it had already ended on the 2nd of March, Monday, at Greenhills Shopping Center, when Archie Paray, 40, held his former employer’s office hostage. Afterwards, the gears that had been set in motion could no longer be stopped. That was our last train out of the pandemic, Duterte, his unsure men, and the lockdowns. We missed it.

This does not mean, in any way, that I am charging any more crimes to Paray and his employers than they are already accused of. Besides, the pattern for 2020 had already been set as early as January: when Taal Volcano spewed towers and towers of ash and COVID-19 entered our shores and the President couldn’t be found, when Bato’s US visa was cancelled and Teddy Boy Locsin Jr. made an ass of himself in front of protesters at the DFA, when the US under Trump almost declared war against Iran, when Kobe Bryant died in a helicopter crash.

But March 2 was a point of no return. By March 6, Friday, there was superspreader event, also in Greenhills, traced to a person making use of the prayer room on top of the parking lot of Unimart. Now with nine months of pandemic experience under our belts, we can imagine the butterfly effect that the event set into motion, and understand 2020 better.

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civil society

Driven to exhaustion: privilege and possibility #2020

January 15, 2021 by
D

There are many things we might have in common, living where we do, under the leadership that we have, in a 2020 riddled by crises. Here where it wasn’t (isn’t) just the pandemic, as it was a Taal Volcano eruption early in January 2020, government’s refusal to ban Chinese mainlanders from entering the Philippines despite the threat of Covid-19 spread in February, the longest lockdown/quarantines in the world from March 2020 to the present, strong typhoons and massive flooding in the last two months of the year.

It is easy to think this is all a matter of being Filipino, but it seems important to highlight how this is also a matter of social class. Of course one is mindful about using the term “middle class,” tenuous and unstable as that category is, especially given the pandemic. To my mind though, the category suffices to define this particular privilege that is important to acknowledge, as it is important to address. Because we are often told to check our privilege, which also inevitably silences us: the majority after all, have it worse.

But why invalidate this particular experience of the middle class? Why be silenced by the notion of privilege, when while we are not the majority who are poor, neither are we at the opposite end of this deepening wealth gap? We are not the 5% who are oligarchs and old rich, for whom half-a-million beach trips and vacations is part of this new normal. Neither are we influencers and celebrities who are selling a new normal of spending thousands on Covid-19 tests just to go on a beach trip, or to party with friends.

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