To the 99 percent

Last month, I dreamt of a Christmas Day when every child in the country happily clutched one of their favorite toys as they rushed to greet their elders the season's best cheers.

On that day, every couple, every family had a decent room or shelter for themselves that they could finally call their own. There was enough food on the table to nourish the household. Each member of the family had a set of new clothes to wear. No worn-out shoes, ragged clothing, nor dirty linen could be seen anywhere. Adults worried not about how to earn their living since they looked forward to productive and rewarding jobs after the holidays. The young ones thought nothing about labor nor school for they all were certain of getting educated in modern schools. The elderly, ill and differently-abled were not troubled by accessibility to health care. Every citizen of that blissful country were contented. They enjoyed the special day with their loved ones.

In that dream, people were free to be alive, to think, to care, to find their true potentials, to share and to contribute to social advancement. They all had access to resources for their nourishment, well-being, education, security… There was no greed nor hunger, while society's wealth, being harnessed for more abundance, was generously distributed.

The prevailing order and already balanced ecosystem seemed sustainable for thousands of years more.

I woke up awed but not surprised of what I recalled from that dream. Days later, as I did my errands, I took long walks from one big mall to nearby department stores. I window-shopped in malls along the highways of Edsa, from Quezon City, Mandaluyong, Makati and then to downtown Manila. At every mall “sale” and the pre-Christmas rush, shoppers curiously looked at clothes, accessories, food, wares, appliances, toys and their price tags, bargain-hunting for what could meet their needs. Inside the big malls and at the thousands of stores in Quiapo, Avenida, Binondo and Divisoria, one could find almost every necessity and nice things for sale. Inside government (rented or controlled) warehouses, as t.v. news revealed, one could find countless container vans filled with confiscated items that could instead be donated to the victims of recent storms and flooding, and to those who neither have property nor daily bread.

The sight of mountains of rice in warehouses; truckloads of fruits, vegetables, fish and meat in marketplaces; hundreds of empty buildings, condominiums and big houses; and endless hectares of idle land all make me wonder why there's so much hunger, anguish and powerlessness in people struggling to survive a hand-to-mouth existence, even if they were literally sitting beside the necessities and nice things for sale here and elsewhere. Commodities are in oversupply but most people could not purchase everything that they really need.

The 99 percent of our population is highly segmented and seems skeptical about any meaningful, qualitative change. I wonder when will the “Occupy Wall Street” protests, after spreading to parts of USA and Europe, reach Asia and the Philippines, if only to provoke us to re-think our situation.