Hard times, good times

Commentary

By Denis Murphy

Life in the fishing communities of Tacloban City devastated by Supertyphoon “Yolanda” can be austere and sacred one day, and funny and quite beautiful the next. Here are some of those times.

On the altar at a capilla in Costa Brava, Barangay 88, is the strangest group of holy statues I have ever seen. A life-sized statue of the Blessed Mother has no hands, a statue of Jesus is headless, smaller statues lack arms and legs and angels have lost wings. At the center of the altar is a statue of the Sacred Heart with the heart missing. The embossed wooden heart was torn away in the storm.

The statues are the blind, the lame and the damaged of the spirit world. All the statues were recovered from the ruins of the people’s houses.

As I stared at the statues, I felt I knew them. These very statues seemed familiar, not just the persons they represented. I wondered for a while and then it struck me: The statues reminded me of the group of poor people we had met on entering the barangay. Those people had seemed especially troubled, crestfallen. The women were thinner, more harried looking, than in the other areas in which we work. A little girl looked at me with large haunted eyes.

The shoreline Barangay 88 was among the hardest hit in all of Tacloban. Some 719 people died; in the Costa Brava district alone, 122 were dead. These were all families living peacefully by the sea, as they had for 30 years or more. All the houses were blasted, so the area is now a field of shattered rocks and concrete as far as the eye can see. The people’s efforts to get help have largely failed, they told us. The women told stories of disappointment. No NGOs worked here, except for Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. In this chapel, the statues are the people and the people are the statues.

The story is that a woman in another town dreamed of the Sacred Heart statue buried under debris. She had no connection with Costa Brava, but she came directly to the spot where the statue lay, according to the local people, and found the statue. She wanted to take it away with her, but the people stopped her. They put the statue in the capilla that is now just a back wall and a meter of roofing extending out over the altar. They surrounded it with the other statues found in the ruins. People say the statue works miracles.

Miracles or not, it seems God has identified Himself with the typhoon victims. Is there any better place for Him to make His appearance than in this sad place where so many died, is there any better way to show that He and the poor people are one? How could this closeness be expressed more convincingly than to have Jesus, Mary and His saints and angels share the sufferings of the poor, the storm surge, destruction and helplessness, including the need to have others pull them out of the debris?

We have to know more about popular piety and folk religion to know how the poor feel about the statues, but I’m sure they are a most welcome presence in the area.

It was a different story a few days earlier in another barangay at the launch of 40 fishing boats organized by the Holy Spirit nuns. The nuns received the money for the boats and nets from donors; the fishers helped build the boats. The nuns and the fishers have signed a memorandum of agreement that includes a savings plan, and Archbishop John Du of Palo blessed the boats.

The boats and the memorandum of agreement are the first signs of a people’s independent organization arising in the coastal communities of Barangays 88, 89 and 90.

After the formal ceremony was over—which also included the presentation of 14 pedicabs—the boats were put in the water and the fishers, children, guests and nuns (including the superior general of the Holy Spirit congregation, Sr. Maria Theresia Hornemann, SSpS) piled in. Soon the boats were tracing beautiful designs on the sea that had done so much damage to the people only last November. The people have fought back from near annihilation with dignity. At the very end of the day, as we left, there were children swimming in the sea—tiny black silhouettes against the gray water.

On our first night in Tacloban we were told by the Redemptorist missionaries under Brother Karl Gaspar that there is shame and regret in many hearts. People did not act with the bravery that their children deserved. People saved themselves rather than their dear ones.

This guilt needs careful pastoral and clinical care, which the Redemptorists are extending. People are ashamed that they survived when their children died, though they may have done nothing wrong. Such guilt may be felt more by the poor than by well-off people who may have greater ability to excuse themselves.

Finally, last Feb. 15, a Saturday, we attended a feeding of 175 children in the Payapay district of Barangay 89. The children sang, played games, did exercises, and ate  arroz  caldo  prepared in cauldrons by the local mothers. The children were traumatized by Yolanda, we were told, but you’d never know it watching them singing and laughing. A child not yet a year old had a smile that made people laugh. Her mother and the children around chanted a certain song and the baby flashed two smiles as quick as the blink of an eye. Everyone laughed. The mothers repeated this little show, laughing harder and harder, as they realized, it seemed, that they could laugh freely once again.

If the people can laugh and form their democratic people’s organization to deal with a harsh and unjust world, and if they can hold on to their deep understanding of God, “all will be well … and all matter of things will be well.” (St. Julian of Norwich +1416).

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates (urbanpoorassociates@ymail.com).

From the House to the Senate

Philippine Daily Inquirer

Letter to the Editor

Urban poor leaders advocating amendments to the 1992 Urban Development and Housing Act (UDHA) visited the House of Representatives and Senate early December to hand over copies of a letter to certain legislators. In that letter, they thanked the lawmakers for legislation that favored the poor and asked for their continued support for the poor. They also sought their help to get the UDHA amended. The group believes that the proposed amendments to the UDHA will address and solve many present-day housing issues, including eviction.

Urban poor leaders wore the most decent clothes they had and brought their identification cards those days they visited Congress.

At the House, they were stopped by security guards. They told the guards that they had letters for Rep. Cresente Paez, the author of the amendment bill, and for 15 other congressmen who also sponsored it. Only four of the urban poor leaders were allowed to enter, the rest were sent away. When the four leaders were in the Congress canteen, the guards asked them to leave even though they were still eating. They ignored the guards and proceeded to bring the letters to the congressmen-addressees. The urban poor felt that they were treated like trash at the House.

In contrast, the Senate was very accommodating. They felt that they were welcomed with open arms by the institution. They were able to give their letters and felt they were greeted with warmth in the Senate offices they went to. Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano found time for them and assured them of his support. Sen. Bam Aquino, a sponsor of the UDHA amendments, acknowledged the efforts of the urban poor leaders in amending the UDHA.

Ordinary people appreciate being welcomed as friends by public officials.

—CELIA V. SANTOS,

advocacy officer,

Urban Development and Housing Act,

Task Force UDHA Amendments,

25-A Mabuhay St.,

Barangay Central, Quezon City

It takes a village

Commentary
By Denis Murphy

Some people who work with poor people claim they have never heard so much nasty criticism of the poor as they have in the last few weeks. One widely respected commentator compared the poor to rats.

Two quotations—from very different people: Pope John Paul II and an elder of the Dumagat living in the Sierra Madre mountains above General Nakar—may help us understand the five million urban poor men, women and children who live among us.

Said John Paul through his Pontifical Commission on Justice and Peace: “Every family living in a slum through no fault of their own is a victim of injustice.” In effect he said: The poor are not in the slums because they want and deserve to be there, but because society has put and kept them there.

I first heard the Dumagat saying from Fr. Pete Montallana, a Franciscan, who worked and lived with the Dumagat of General Nakar. The saying is: “This is a small cup of rice. It is not enough for a man, but it is enough for the whole village.” A small cup of rice cannot fill even a single person’s stomach, but the village can see it as a symbol of the solidarity that enables them to struggle on despite hunger and other problems. There are things more valuable to the community than food. High in the Sierra Madre, every child born in the village is welcomed, every death regretted. No one goes hungry if the others have food; no family is left to sleep in the open.

A few years ago a group of us hiked up the Infanta mountains with Bishop Julio Labayen. There, we reached a Dumagat village hidden among the trees. Someone had warned the old chief we were coming because he met us dressed in a scarlet loincloth and carrying his bow and arrows. He was as lean and muscled as a much younger man.

The chief greeted us, and we talked about the people’s problems. Later we asked him about his bow and arrows. “There is one for birds,” he said, showing one with a very thin arrow head. Another arrow was for wild pig and deer. One of us asked: “What do you use on your enemies?”  The old man said, “We have no enemies.” He posed for us shooting the arrows. It was a strikingly beautiful sight—the old man in the brilliant red loincloth against the tall hardwood trees.

One day we may be able to rejoice with each new birth and mourn each death in our city as they do in the mountains. We will care for one another. But first, we must stop oppressing the poor.

Pope John Paul II said the urban poor are victims of injustice. The Dumagat teach us that a human community cares for everyone, with no one left hungry or alone, much less evicted or similarly punished.
Americans, especially New Yorkers, are an argumentative people. Sometimes they argue about trivia, but now, in the case of the black youth Trayvon Martin who was shot to death by a white neighborhood guard, they argue about a truly important matter that has many implications for the Philippines.

The watchman George Zimmerman was found innocent on grounds of self defense. It is difficult to summarize the pros and cons of the verdict, but several people have boiled the whole problem down to this: When the police arrived at the scene, they found a black unarmed youth dead on the street, while a white man stood over him with a gun in hand. Something is terribly wrong with the verdict, the critics say. They are not accusing anyone of doing wrong, but they seek a deeper and wider reflection on the context of the death, including the long history of black-white relations.

Maybe we have in Trayvon Martin’s death a good example of social injustice, or what can be called an unjust social system. It is the same system John Paul spoke of. A principal characteristic of this system is that people can follow the law and be legally innocent, but horrible things are done.

A Philippine parallel may be found in the government’s practice of evicting poor families forcefully. Even if the evictions are done with complete legality, including the provision of resettlement, we are left with the basic fact that poor families are thrown out of their homes, their lives turned upside down, the children traumatized, and their futures stunted. We can say the same thing that people said of Trayvon Martin: “Something is terribly wrong.” Yes, it may be legal, but is the pain of the poor really justified? There remains a dramatic imbalance between results and justification. Also, we are not at all certain that it is the poor who pollute the rivers or block the floodwaters or stand in danger of drowning, as officials claim in the course of justifying their actions.

Eviction is like torture: an action that can never be justified. We still do not understand the long-term injury that eviction does to poor people. Modern societies have banned all forms of torture.

We are not likely to rule out all evictions this year or in the lifetime of this administration, but hopefully we will look more closely into the total background and the lasting harm that evictions do, and find alternate solutions to land problems. We don’t torture anymore. We have left it behind us. There are reasons to leave evictions behind. We can find other solutions.

Social injustice and unjust institutions reflect a society’s culture and history. They are hard to criticize because we ourselves are part of them. American rules on self-defense and violence have been constructed in a racially troubled society. Perhaps there are antiblack elements still left in the results. Perhaps there is antipoor bias in our eviction laws. We need more reflection.

Evictions have yet to be thoroughly examined. One study made 10 years ago found that it took evicted families five years on average to get back to the economic level they were in when the eviction occurred. The study indicated that children traumatized in an eviction remained troubled for years.

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates [urbanpoorassociates@ymail.com].

This Church of ours

Commentary
By Denis Murphy

Philippine Daily Inquirer

At any Sunday afternoon Mass in our Project 4 church, we see the very old and babies, poor people and scavengers (dressed up for Sunday Mass), lawyers, and young girls heartbreakingly unaware of all that await them—love, marriage, childbirth and motherhood, and maybe serious disappointment. There are grandmothers and a little girl in the pew ahead who spends her Mass staring back at me. There is an old man who, I think, stays for two or more Masses. There are nurses in white uniforms, beggars at the door (as there have been at church doors for over a thousand years), and young men who may be police officers. A young mother with two small children seems unaccountably sad.


It is a deep honor to be there with them every Sunday. One of the graces God gives old people, I believe, is the ability to take pride in all the people around them, as if they were their own, all of them from the babies to the nurses, young men, the choir members, the boys and girls serving at the altar, and the old folks. The old take pride in them all.

We sit there waiting for the Mass to begin, these very varied people, ready to ponder God’s word, laugh at a good story, change for the better, or at least try to change and to help one another if we can. These are God’s people, I thought; these few hundred people gathered here in Project 4, Cubao, are part of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church we profess in the Creed, just as much as the 2,000 plus bishops who gathered at Vatican II. The Holy Spirit is here. Jesus is in their midst as He promised.

We cannot separate these people and all the other members of the Church, known and unknown, from the priests and bishops, but I took away from that afternoon Mass a realization that we must do more in the Church to appreciate the dignity of the lay people and to make sure they develop in the Church as God wishes.

Perhaps we can gather from our community-organizing work some hints about how the Church may go about enhancing the life of the people of God. Often it is a matter of allowing people to be themselves. It is the one profession I know well.

In community organization we help poor people come together to learn how to analyze their problems—that is, the problems they face every day; we help them work out their own solutions, taking into account their allies and abilities and the strengths of the people opposing them. Lastly, we help them act in a democratic, nonviolent, community-wide way. I am not suggesting that the Church imitate this process as such, but rather, that it look at some of the unexpected, yet welcome, outcomes of this process.

At a certain point the poor people no longer need the community organizers (COs) on any regular basis. They initiate works on their own, imaginative works that the COs wouldn’t think of. Creativity spreads in a community; initiatives widen. People make better arrangements for savings, toilets, urban gardens, contracts with foundations, and buyers of their cottage-industry products, estate management, repayment schedules, and community discipline than the COs can.

Does the Church allow for or encourage such creativity among the laity? What, for example, does it learn from such people’s devotions such as the Black Nazarene? Nine million people gather, barefoot. What does that say to Church leaders? How can they help unlock the tremendous amounts of goodwill in that great movement of people for building a just and prosperous country?

Community organization sees in its more successful efforts the people coming together in true solidarity with one another: They form communities where they help one another and take care of the sick and very poor. They make sure all children go to school. These communities are truly religious, often of mixed Christian and Muslim people.

Does the Church actively build such communal solidarity? It has done so in the past—for instance, in the Solidarity Movement in Poland at the start of John Paul II’s papacy. The Basic Ecclesial Movement (BEC), sometimes called the Basic Christian Community (BCC), unites Catholics in prayer and social action in their areas, but the movement has never flourished here. The latest figures I received from the National Secretariat for Social Action a few years ago were about 7,000 BECs or BCCs, with about 70,000 members, in a country of 80 million Catholics. Some say the movement didn’t expand because it was too controlled by priests. In Latin America, it was more a people’s movement.

Our COs are sometimes disappointed when they are not publicly recognized in the media, or in the people’s narratives. We tell them they should be happy that the people believe they did the good work themselves. Humility becomes people who work with the poor. Let the people claim the success: The poor will never forget them; the poor, in their private moments, know deep down who helped them.

Perhaps the Church needs to learn the same lesson of humility. It requires big doses of common sense. Many women, for example, react critically when they see rows of priests and bishops investments moving up the middle aisle, and not a woman among them. We should find some other way to create solemnity.

We are called in the Philippines to be the Church of the Poor. We are sent like Jesus to preach good news to the poor, heal the sick, give sight to the blind, bind wounds, feed the hungry, and let the oppressed go free. There’s no room here for pride of any sort.

Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation letter is a model of such humility.

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates [urbanpoorassociates@ymail.com].

Hopeful approaches to homelessness

Commentary
By: Gerald M. Nicolas
Philippine Daily Inquirer


“So there are also squatters in Korea?” an urban poor mother and leader sitting beside me quipped in Filipino while looking at photos of so-called “vinyl houses” being flashed on the screen. (Some 4,900 families evicted from various places in Seoul occupy vacant spaces without permission and build shelters made of vinyl, thus the name.) But instead of correcting her for using a politically incorrect term for people without security of tenure (the more acceptable term nowadays is “informal settlers”), I replied: “That’s because we don’t see them in Korean telenovelas.”

I wished that the 500 or so urban poor leaders inside the convention hall shared her candid realization upon seeing the pictures that spoke volumes of the global nature of the problem of land and tenure insecurity in cities. It had probably dawned on her that the 3 million Filipino families living in slums and without legal land or housing tenure, were not alone in waking up daily to the possibility of getting displaced and having their houses and lives destroyed. Had they known that close to 4.5 million people in the world were affected by evictions between 2007 and 2008 and that 55 percent of these happened in Asia, according to the Center on Housing Rights and Evictions, they would have left the venue feeling more depressed and helpless than ever.

Or probably not.

Optimism was palpable inside the hall where community leaders from 12 countries in Asia—from Korea to Pakistan to Burma (Myanmar) to the Philippines—gathered for the launching of a regional assembly of people’s organizations called the Urban Poor Coalition Asia or UPCA. What was remarkable about the assembly was that despite the differences in mother tongues, the language of hope to address a shared issue—the threat of forced eviction—echoed loud and clear among “Asian friends.”

Listening to the reports (or reading the English phrases and sentences in their PowerPoint presentations), one could see the richness of experience of the urban poor, in devising and adopting different strategies and approaches in empowering themselves to resist forced evictions. In all the countries participating in the UPCA, community-level savings mobilization proved practical. In Thailand, for example, communities have compulsory savings of 200 baht per month per household (or only P10 per day). One citywide network was able to buy a parcel of land for soon-to-be evicted families “with our own fund” and a loan from the government and development organizations like the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights. The property is located very near the original community, ensuring proximity to factories and other employment opportunities in the city.

Advocating housing rights through coalition-building and networking is also an essential strategy for influencing policies and challenging practices by government. In Nepal, the city network that includes women and youth held dialogues with political parties and explained its agenda to the public through various media. As a result, local governments in the cities of Bharatpur and Biratnagar have given free land for housing and have allocated a budget for citywide upgrading projects. In the Philippines, networks such as the Urban Poor Alliance stepped up the anti-eviction advocacy by entering into a covenant with President Aquino in 2010. So far, the allocation of P10 billion per year for in-city medium-rise housing projects for informal settlers along waterways has been the most significant (but yet to be realized) milestone of this engagement with the national government.

In-depth, detailed and, at best, participatory research has also gained increased importance in designing the strategies employed by many organized urban poor to prevent forced evictions. Indonesian delegates reported the significant contribution of technical assistance provided by architects and engineers in determining the magnitude of informal housing along Ciliwung River in east Jakarta and in capacitating the affected families in studying flood mitigation measures. It also proved helpful in proposing low-cost housing designs in accordance with the aspirations of the communities. In Korea, the NGO Asia Bridge conducted surveys to help assess the general condition of vinyl-house settlements in Seoul and generated maps to locate potential areas for upgrading and propoor development.

Nothing in the reports claimed that a single strategy can address the problem of homelessness. It has been a combination of approaches complementing each other. A community organization cannot rely solely on savings generation without trying to compel government to open opportunities for grassroots participation in the land market and land use. Neither can anti-eviction mobilization activities provide a long-term solution to tenure insecurity without sufficient and community-managed resources for the social preparation of would-be affected families. Research is needed to find out specific principles that will guide advocacy regarding what constitutes an adequate and legally acceptable housing intervention. There can be more strategies depending on the context and shared values of people, and in the end, the different strategies aim to achieve the same goal: tenure security and housing for the poor. Hope springs from allowing people’s organizations to explore innovative ways for solving their issues, different opportunities for building partnerships, and alternative venues for working with other stakeholders, especially government.

Finding Andres Bonifacio

Commentary
By: Denis Murphy
Philippine Daily Inquirer


I was invited recently to a meeting of the Center for Patriotic Initiatives where the topic for discussion was: “Two Years After Arroyo: Prospects and Challenges to the Patriotic Forces.” Among the invited speakers were Francisco Nemenzo, former president of the University of the Philippines; political analyst Ramon Casiple; and former Army Brig. Gen. Danilo Lim, now deputy commissioner of the Bureau of Customs. I was deeply flattered to be invited with such men. I wondered, of course, if a mistake had been made in inviting me.

I couldn’t go in the end because I hurt my hip, but I knew what I would have said. I would have talked of the “meeting” that took place late last year between the urban poor and Andres Bonifacio. That meeting capped, in a real if limited way, the development of urban poor leaders, so that they and others like them are a challenge today to the patriotic forces. The urban poor and Bonifacio met like long lost relatives.

That meeting was arranged by Professor Charleston “Xiao” Chua of Dela Salle University. We met Xiao by chance while he was giving a lecture on the Tejeros Convention in Ternate, Cavite. He brought the past to life, as he talked of Bonifacio’s last days. He took his students to the actual historical sites of the events. And they saw the cells where Bonifacio was kept, and heard stories of his last days from the local people who had heard them from their ancestors. My wife and I, for example, heard the school principal in Maragondon point out the acacia tree where, her parents told her, Bonifacio would often urinate on his way in or out of his cell in the convento there.

We arranged for Xiao to lead a visit of the poor people we work with through the towns of Kawit, Ternate, Tanza, Naic and Maragondon, and finally to the trail that leads up into the mountains where Bonifacio and his brother Procopio were killed by Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo’s men. They sang patriotic songs there in the late afternoon. The poor, most of whom are from Tondo and neighboring areas, were captivated by the life and beliefs of Bonifacio. They identified with him.

They learned that Bonifacio was far more than the warrior with a bolo, as Jose Rizal was much more of a warrior than the peaceful non-violent leader portrayed in our textbooks. They learned Bonifacio had a total plan for the reform of life in the Philippines. They identified with Bonifacio because he, too, was poor and, like many of them, had to work to raise younger brothers and sisters. They admired how he struggled to find a place for himself in society. Bonifacio preached comradeship, brotherhood (and sisterhood), kindness and charity to one another as well as the need to fight for one’s rights. The poor found themselves very comfortable with Bonifacio’s emphasis on care for others and with his vision of the Philippines. They especially enjoyed his understanding of freedom which is kaginhawaan, which seems very similar to the “peace” spoken of in John’s Gospel (Jn. 20:19-23).

The poor we work with had undergone two long learning seasons in their lives before they “met” Bonifacio. The first season was community organization. It was spent struggling with government and the powerful for land, housing, basic services, better education, job opportunities and respect. Not so different from the Bonifacio’s patriotic struggle. The second “season” was their political work during the 2010 election where they chose their candidate at meetings of 300 leaders, and then acted as regular party workers, canvassing voters, setting up offices, keeping in contact, witnessing the counting, and finally celebrating victory and bemoaning defeat. They outgrew the political fragmentation of the poor that had allowed venal politicians to grab their votes in exchange for little food, little money and airy promises.

In the years 2005-2008 they thought of having their own political party which they called Poor People’s Party. Its vision:

•A pro-poor agenda: a party working on the basic issues of all poor in the cities and in provinces; on the issues of industrial laborers, farm workers, fisherfolk, peasants and small farmers, informal sectors, youth, the aged, tribal people, women, differently disabled persons and the like;

• National in scope: a party fielding candidates in barangay and local government elections, and in the years to come in provincial and national elections;

• Dedicated to the people’s cause and to the equality of all: a party whose leaders are knowledgeable about their given tasks and duties; hot-headed but strong-willed; and neither corrupt nor corruptible;

• Strongly anchored on the social teachings of the Catholic, Protestant and Muslim faiths.
Even before the poor met Bonifacio they shared, it seems, his manner of thinking about reform.
In the two periods, the poor learned how to analyze their situation to find what was truly good for them and what was the common good; to make strategy and tactics; and finally to have the courage to act in a mass-based, democratic and nonviolent manner, including in electoral politics. Add the inspiration of Bonifacio and you have a people ready for reform.

The urban poor are the challenge today to the patriotic forces. The poor desire reform more than any other sectors of the population because they have so little of power and wealth now. Many have the experience and capability to work for reform.

I would have ended my remarks at that meeting by quoting the words of Jesus: “The harvest is great, but the laborers are few. Pray the Lord of the harvest to send more workers into His fields.” (Lk. 10:02)

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates.

Advice also for Aquino

Commentary

by: Denis Murphy

February 12, 2012

Three years ago former US President Bill Clinton wrote an article in Time Magazine 

(June 24, 2009) advising newly elected President Barack Obama to follow the priorities of America’s Depression era President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Whether Obama followed the advice or not, the readers can judge for themselves. May I suggest that the advice Clinton offered Obama may also be of use to President Aquino.

At the beginning of the article, Clinton talks of the bond Roosevelt created between the ordinary working men and women and himself.

“My grandfather was a dirt farmer with only a sixth-grade education. During the Depression, he eked out a living selling blocks of ice. But in those days, even though he was poor, he knew someone special: from listening to the fireside chats on the radio, he knew Franklin Roosevelt. And he believed that Roosevelt knew what his life was like – and cared about it too.

“I grew up listening to my grandfather’s tales of what it was like to live through the Depression and the war and what Roosevelt meant to him. When I was President, in another time of change and uncertainty, I often looked at the portrait of FDR in the Roosevelt Room and remembered my grandfather’s stories. Roosevelt had a deep personal connection to ordinary citizens.”

When Roosevelt died in 1945, ordinary people in tears lined the railroad tracks that led back to his home in Hyde Park, New York to watch the train carrying his body pass by.

I have only one personal memory of President Roosevelt. On a cold and overcast day many years ago in the Bronx, we were playing in the Church schoolyard when someone shouted, “The President’s coming down the Concourse (the main road of the Bronx).” We ran up the hill just in time to see the flashing lights of motorcycles and police cars coming toward us. Franklin D. Roosevelt had been our president all our lives, but we had never seen him. We heard cheering, but it rose and fell in a strange way. The car came slowly because the president was campaigning. Then it was in front of us. We pushed toward the car and had a good look at the old man inside. He looked much older than his pictures in the papers or newsreels. His face was drawn and gray and he sat back in the chair like a man on his sick bed, all alone in the back seat of the limousine. We waved and shouted. He seemed to see our group and he waved at us. Even as young boys we knew he was dying. People had grown silent along the way when they saw how sick he looked.

Clinton claims Roosevelt “got the big things right.” When he came into office during the Depression, he saw that the ills of the country could not be addressed without more aggressive involvement by the government. He ran for president as a fiscal conservative, promising to balance the budget. But unlike his predecessor, he quickly realized that, with prices collapsing and unemployment exploding, only the federal government could step into the breach and restart the economy.

Clinton recalls that Roosevelt surrounded himself with brilliant people, people who may have been far smarter than he was himself. He quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes to remind us that sheer intellectual brilliance is not everything: “Roosevelt had a second-class mind, but a first-class temperament.” This gave Roosevelt, Clinton says, the power to inspire others with his passion and to form a team that could work together.

Finally, according to Clinton, Roosevelt had the confidence to give up on projects that weren’t working, admit his failure and begin in another direction. He believed in experimentation, but he didn’t deny the evidence of failure when it came in. A president, claims Clinton, needs an appetite for experimentation and the determination to keep what works and scrap what doesn’t.

Do these suggestions of Bill Clinton have some usefulness for President Aquino?

Can and should President Aquino follow Roosevelt’s example and bond closely with the ordinary poor and middle-class people of the country? Should he build his political power base, as Roosevelt did, on this union of ordinary people and the president? Is there any other firm foundation for President Aquino on which to build? Will the poor and middle-class support give him the ability to make the basic reforms needed in the country? Will such a union allow him to escape from the limitations of our elite-dominated bureaucracy?

Has President Aquino decided on all the “big things” that must be done in his term of office? It’s clear he wants to eliminate corruption. What else are his goals? After corruption, what are the next three crucial things that need to be done?

Has the present government experimented sufficiently with new solutions? Have we taken a fresh look at old problems in the hope of finding new workable solutions? Perhaps we should be more creative. There are no magic formulas, but new situations call for at least a look at new solutions.

Finally, does the President have the most qualified and unified staff possible? Even ordinary people now talk about political skirmishes inside the administration’s top people. This isn’t supposed to happen in a presidential system of government where the President is free to choose the staff he wants.

Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933 which was a grim time for his country.

Unemployment had reached 33 percent. Hoovervilles, the settlements of the poor and unemployed were, like our urban poor areas, growing everywhere. They were named scornfully after former President Herbert Hoover. Farmers like the Jody family of “Grapes of Wrath” lost their land to bad weather and venal banks. A popular song of the day was “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” Roosevelt’s portrait is fittingly on the dime coin now as if to remind us he gave the poor what they most needed, that is, his comradeship.

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates.

Choosing someone for canonization

Commentary By: Denis Murphy Philippine Daily Inquirer 9:03 pm | Tuesday, September 20th, 2011 Most often we don’t know why the Church chooses one holy person for canonization and not another. We don’t know why Pope John Paul II was beatified and not Pope John XXIII whom all the world loved or the wise and humble Paul VI. Most people would probably say anyone of the three could have been chosen. Choices are made for strategic and political (Church politics) reasons, in addition to heroic personal sanctity. There are many people today living truly saintly lives, but only a handful from each generation are set on the road to sainthood. To be canonized a person must have personal sanctity and fit in with the Church’s strategies and priorities for evangelization. The person must be seen as relevant to the problems of the people of the day. To appreciate how this process works let us attempt to choose someone for canonization. But first, it should be clear we are not talking about a person’s face-to-face relationship with God. This relationship at its highest is described in Deuteronomy as being God’s “intimate friend.” We are talking, instead, about the person’s public work in our society. We are talking of a lay person, because for the Church this is the age of the laity. This current policy is due not only to the dwindling numbers of priests, but to the demands of the age that were apparent even before the great outflow of priests in the 1960s-1980s. Our candidate will be a man, not a woman. I apologize to our women, but they are still problematic for many Churchmen. The man chosen will symbolize the laity’s mission to transform the world. He will show in his life how lay people can, in the eyes of the Church, transform the world’s politics, economics, science, practice of justice, educational systems and the other institutions that govern us. The person is not under the authority of the Church, but he recognizes the need for the help of the historical wisdom of the Church to enrich and purify the institutions of the world. He is open to the Gospel, especially to its concerns for the poor, women and the downtrodden. He will not be seen as someone worried about internal Church matters, but rather one who is totally concerned with the transformation of society. Where in Philippine society is such a man? If pushed to respond many might point to Nandy Pacheco. Remember we are not choosing here the man we think is best suited for sainthood, but rather the one we think the Church might choose as an example of the lay people it seeks for its work in the world. The Church might select Nandy because of his work on the Gunless Society and Ang Kapatiran Political Party. The Social Teaching of the Church is the foundation of Ang Kapatiran’s platform. The party was publicly supported by some bishops, though Nandy was disappointed that more bishops didn’t do so. The party didn’t do well in the last presidential election, but Nandy is not giving up. The Church doesn’t necessarily look for winners in society. It has in fact a fondness for losers. Ang Kapatiran’s relatively poor showing in the election may reflect the Church’s loss of esteem among ordinary people in recent years due to its perceived over-closeness to former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, the sex scandals around the world and the Church’s absence from the main justice struggles. It hasn’t been seen lately as a crusading force in society. Individual bishops and dioceses have been so seen, but not most. Those who live by the sword will die by the sword: those lay people who have success in their reform role in the world because of the esteem the ordinary people have for the Church may suffer if that support weakens. Lay people will have to learn to live and work with a Church that is increasingly cautious, and less in tune with the younger generation. The lay people may be seen in the role of grown children looking after their elderly parents. They will need patience and understanding in that role. Nandy has not stopped because of setbacks. Neither has his Ang Kapatiran Party. He has, however, shown an inclination to put his efforts into a radical conversion of the human heart, since that is required before people can accept the reforms that are demanded in politics and other arenas of secular life. Nandy is now organizing a movement that, he hopes, will change the hearts of Filipinos and enable them to accept the needed changes in the country’s socio-economic and political structures. This movement urges people to accept Jesus’ peace. This is the peace Jesus entrusted to his Apostles on the evening of his Resurrection. “Peace be with you,” Jesus said twice to them (John 20:19-23). These words were the polite greeting Jewish people offered one another in older days, but his use of the phrase carried much more than a simple greeting. In it Jesus conveyed to the Apostles all the blessings of His Kingdom—all the wisdom, humor, courage, perseverance and simple kindness they would need in spreading His message throughout the world. This peace is ours, Nandy points out, if we accept it wholeheartedly. We should “accept” this peace of Jesus rather than “seek it,” since Jesus has already offered it to us in the Gospel. Knowing Nandy, I think he might prefer a big victory for his party at the polls to canonization. Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates. His email address is upa@pldtdsl.net.