Justice’s two voices

Commentary

By Denis Murphy

Most people I talked with appreciated Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle’s impassioned critique of the pork barrel scam and his low-key presence at the Aug. 26 Luneta rally. His actions raise once again the question of how the Catholic Church should address the problems facing people in society today, especially the problems of social justice. To whom should it speak? What response should it ask? To whom should we all speak and with whom should we work?

Traditionally the Church has responded to injustice in two ways. In the first, the road more traveled, the Church describes the problem it wishes to solve, and then calls on the heads of state, the rich and the powerful, to solve the problem. The approach presumes that change in society comes from the top and that the powerful can solve the problems. The second approach has been taken by Jaime Cardinal Sin, Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador and many other Church leaders. They realize basic change in society regularly involves a confrontation between the powerful and the powerless. And they choose to speak in the name of the victims, and have the sufferings of the poor and the powerless front and center in their minds. They end by calling on all men and women of good will to oppose the unjust ways of the powerful.

The first approach may have worked in the Middle Ages, when the popes had real power over kings and emperors, and they in turn had near total power over their subjects. But the approach hardly works now: the people of the world have become democrats in their hearts, even if their governments are still authoritarian.

The first approach reechoes the more conservative priestly tradition of the Old Testament; the Cardinal Sin-Archbishop Romero approach continues the prophetic tradition. The second is effective when the Church not only speaks out for the good of the ordinary people but also involves the people in solving the problem. The Church gives a voice to those who are voiceless and calls on the people to take part in the solution. The prophetic voice arises from the suffering heart of the poor, and engages the poor in working out a solution.

This discussion so far is somewhat theoretical. Luckily we have an example of how the two approaches might work out in practice. This example is found in Pope Paul VI’s visit to Tondo in November 1970.

The pope arrived at the Don Bosco school in Barrio Magsaysay on a Sunday afternoon, and almost immediately gave a rather routine greeting and a talk on moral guidance to the mostly urban crowds gathered on the soccer field there. He spoke in Latin, which was translated by a young Salesian priest. The speech, written by the Vatican Curia, was, in general outline, the speech he delivered in the urban poor areas he visited around the world. It was polite. It didn’t speak of the land problem that raged in Tondo. Toward the end of the speech the pope asked the president to help the poor people, little realizing the president was the cause of the land problem.

Chances are the pope didn’t know of the problem. It was created by President Ferdinand Marcos’ desire to evict 180,000 poor people from Tondo to turn the area into an upscale housing and business center. The poor opposed the plan at a very visceral level. The poor people of the Zone One Tondo Organization were there in big numbers in the hope of hearing the pope support their rights to land tenure security.

Then the pope walked through the muddy streets of Tondo—there had just been a major typhoon—to the run-down shack of a poor family. He stayed there longer than expected and, when he returned to Don Bosco, he seemed stunned by the poverty he had seen. He didn’t speak to the officials and priests around him, but held tightly to the hand of a Franciscan Missionary of Mary sister who was just a few feet from me. He looked sad as if someone had died. He looked around and seemed to see the poor people in the soccer field for the first time.

I thought, maybe the poor family he visited had explained the land problem to him. I thought, he may have regretted the inadequacy of his earlier words. Maybe, I thought, he will call for the microphone and speak from his heart about the poverty he had seen and demand that the president settle the problem in a fair and just manner. I thought we might see a pope speak for justice from his heart, with compassion and righteous anger and with all the power of his office.

As everyone knows the pope didn’t. If he had, the history of our Church would be different. Maybe our secular history would also be very different.

Pope Paul’s talk was a good example of the first way the Church has used to approach problems of injustice. His extempore speech would have been an example of the second manner of approach.

* * *

When actor Martin Sheen was here in 1997 to help promote better housing for the poor, he was interviewed by Dong Puno on TV. Puno began by asking Sheen why he was in Manila. Sheen said, “Because I am a Catholic.” He explained that he had been raised to believe that as a Catholic his job in the world was to help the poor and lessen injustice. When he was asked to come to Manila to help, he said he couldn’t refuse.

We may believe we are not qualified to speak about injustice, but then we should read again the early chapters of the Book of Exodus.

Moses said to God when asked to go to the Pharaoh and speak for the Hebrews: “If you please, Lord, I have never been eloquent…. I am slow of speech and tongue.”

God answered: “Who gives one man speech and makes another deaf and dumb… It is I who will assist you in speaking and will teach you all to say.” (Exodus 4:10-12)

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

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].

The Catholic Church—ally of the poor

Commentary

by Denis Murphy

 

For the past 50 years the Catholic Church has been the most reliable ally of the urban poor. This may not be true with all parts of the Church or at all times, but in comparison with other powerful institutions, the Church has been outstanding in this regard. It has campaigned for justice and dignity for the poor. In times of trouble it has extended a protective arm to everyone working in poor areas for the people’s well-being. In times of sorrow the Church has been compassionate.

 

Cardinal Jaime Sin, on the eve of the third and final vote on the Urban Development and Housing Act (March 1992), phoned senators and House representatives, urging them to vote for the bill. How did these politicians feel being asked to support a controversial bill that was soon called “the lousy Lina Act” by its opponents? (Sen. Joey Lina was its principal sponsor.) Not only was the bill controversial, the presidential election campaign of that year was in its last months, so controversy was the last thing politicians wanted. Anyway, in the end they backed the bill, which has proven to be extremely important for the poor.

 

I heard Cardinal Gaudencio Rosales tell a roomful of government housing people, informal settlers and NGOs that the government should exert greater effort to understand the poor. He said the very poor are hungry and near desperate and have little time to worry about “cut-off dates” (sometimes if they were not present by a certain date in a site, they would not be resettled). The cardinal explained the poor cannot easily hold on to documents and many can’t read. He spoke, I thought, with a warm and understanding heart. We make things difficult for the poor, he said. The government later changed its policies.

 

I saw Bishop Julio Labayen lead a rally at the Philippine International Convention Center while a major public event was being celebrated. He demanded that the police bring back a young priest whom the bishop believed had been taken by the government and hidden away, perhaps to be tortured. He wasn’t worried about his image as a bishop. He wanted his priest back. Unfortunately, the bishop was mistaken. The priest had fled the country on his own. The priest’s own sister had lied to the bishop about his arrest.

 

Bishop Labayen and other bishops and superiors time and time again would help wives and mothers find their dead and tortured sons and husbands. Bishop Francisco Claver called down God’s vengeance, “gaba,” on those who tortured prisoners. What is said about the Catholic Church applies also to member churches of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines. They, too, had their shining moments.

 

As we have all noticed, not all Church people acted as well. In recent years interest in the poor has declined in the Church. Bishops and men and women high up in the Church show the same ugly biases against the poor as people who have never meditated on the Gospel. One group of priests wrote Mayor Alfredo Lim at Christmastime last year, pleading with him: “On our knees we are begging God that you, Mr. Mayor, do not allow those urban poor people to rebuild their homes.” Priests begging God and the mayor to stop the poor from rebuilding their homes—during the Christmas season!

 

A famous Jesuit, Fr. John Courtney Murray, once said, “Cruelty in a woman is unnatural.” Men are expected to be cruel at times, but not women. I believe we can also say, “Bias and hatred toward the poor on the part of religious people is truly unnatural.” We expect the Church to help the poor. We expect compassion from its leaders. After all, it is the Church of the Poor, and God has His own mysterious, abundant and “preferential love” for the poor.

 

We have a new pope who has put poverty and the poor at the center of Christian life. We have a new young cardinal who has shown he will follow in the footsteps of his predecessors in the service of the poor.

 

What must they do? John Lloyd, writing for Reuters in BusinessWorld last July 1, has suggestions: “Francis (and other bishops) has to inspire his priests with the zeal to reconvert their often semi-detached flocks into activists for radical social change. He must avoid the excesses of leftism, yet not collapse into mere populism. He must identify the Church with programs of poverty alleviation. He must develop practical answers to the unemployment of the young (maybe as pastoral assistants, aides to aged parishioners or menders of crumbling churches). He must be present at policy discussions on the economy and he must give social teaching some realist underpinning. The Catholic Church has a great many men (it’s chosen to marginalize women, for the most part) of high intelligence, of whom Francis, a Jesuit, is one. Let them bend their minds to address poverty’s constant companion—unemployment.”

 

Yes, hope beckons, but we ask all who can help to hurry. Half of our children go to bed hungry and live all day hungry. Our prostitutes are younger than ever. I’ve noticed pregnant women walking in the slums, sometimes barefoot. Their dresses are tight around their swollen stomachs. They have no money to buy a more appropriate dress. They have nothing to give their children but themselves.

 

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

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Knowing and unknowing

Commentary

By Denis Murphy
Philippine Daily Inquirer

 

Marietta, a woman of buoyant good humor with whom we have worked for years on the R-10 road in Tondo, was telling us why she was happy with her new home in the resettlement area in San Pedro, Laguna. “I have a real home now,” she said. “When I die, my wake can be inside my home, not out in the street.” Traffic on the R-10 roars dangerously close to the poor people’s houses. Holding a wake there is a risky matter. We were surprised that Marietta, still in her 40s, should be thinking of her death and wake.

There are many things we don’t know about the urban poor, including the depth of their unawareness of matters that affect their lives. In a survey made of poor families living along the San Juan River in San Juan City and Quezon City, we found that most of them knew almost nothing about the Urban Development and Housing Act that sets limits on evictions, and nothing about the “Covenant with the Urban Poor” that was signed by President Aquino. The covenant restricts resettlement to on-site, in-city and near-city relocation areas, and forbids the distant relocation patterns of past years that saw up to 80 percent of the people sent to far-off sites abandoning their homes there and returning to Manila. There were no jobs. The poor are not aware they have housing rights guaranteed by law and the Constitution.

When the survey respondents were asked about eviction, they told the interviewers that they knew they were living illegally on the land near the river and therefore had no rights. They told the interviewers to talk to their barangay captains because they would do what these leaders told them to do. The barangay captains traditionally do what the mayor wants in eviction matters, so the poor were in effect turning over all decisions on the matter to the mayors who often are the source of evictions orders.

This ignorance of their rights can be a temptation to the government to ignore the people’s rights, though it seems that the government’s first task should be to inform the people of their rights. These days, even deadly criminals are so informed. We all know the short speech the detective gives as he puts on the handcuffs: “You have the right to remain silent. What you say may be held against you in court. You have a right to a lawyer…”

Are poor people denied similar information? Are they told, “You have a right to question the eviction orders, you have a right to near-city or in-city resettlement”?

We found that 90 percent of the communities along the San Juan River were unorganized. There may be a leader who takes care of Mass in the  capilla  during the fiesta or intercedes with the mayor in special cases, but there is no organization that brings the people together to discuss matters such as imminent eviction and how they should respond. The people, through lack of awareness of their rights and lack of an organization capable of a critical stance toward evictions, are very vulnerable to government “bullying.”

Most importantly, the poor people are not aware of how God looks on their situation, which is, of course, the way we should look on them. God doesn’t want them to live in slums. Neither does He want them forced or talked out of their homes and sent to places that, for lack of jobs, may be more injurious to them than life in the slums. He wants His people to be treated justly. Pope John Paul II once said through his Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace: “Every family that finds itself living in slum-like conditions through no fault of their own is a victim of injustice.” That’s injustice committed by the rest of society.

I feel we may be caught up in a gigantic typhoon of propaganda and spin. People are told they are being evicted “for their own good,” but the people say they have lived along the esteros and rivers for 20 or 30 years and no one has been hurt by the many floods they have experienced. Then we are told the poor families along the waterways are blocking the flow of water and causing the floods that bring the whole city to its knees. Actually, most families along the waterways are at least three meters from the water, and public works officials and World Bank experts have said they do not interfere with the flow of water. We are also told the same poor families pollute the rivers and Manila Bay itself. Research tells us only 5-10 percent of pollution is from the poor. If all the poor along the waterways did nothing all day except “make  ihi,” they still couldn’t pollute the rivers and bay, so vast is the volume of water.

What we need in the matter of pollution are waste treatment plants for industry that really work and treatment plants to serve the hundreds of thousands of families of all income levels whose waste is now poured directly into the Pasig River.

Our haste to evict may be leading us to illegal actions. Some lawyers believe the government plan to give evicted families P18,000 for rent in lieu of resettlement, with a promise to resettle them after a year, may be illegal.

We are gradually shifting all guilt and all necessary sacrifice connected with flood control on to the shoulders of the poor. Reality is much more complex. We are not informing poor people of their rights, though Ramon Magsaysay once promised, “Those who have less in life should have more in law.” We are not helping them organize so they can fully understand and deal with the evictions they face.

Does the country want to go down such a self-righteous road, blaming the poor for our ills, or can we face the huge, complex flood problem, and other problems linked to climate change, as one people, giving new meaning to the old slogan “one for all and all for one”?

There is time. The engineering work for flood control will not even begin for a few more years. Why not solve the problems we face with compassion for all our people?

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

Snows of yesteryear

Commentary

Denis Murphy

 

Sixty years ago this month, a group of young American Jesuit scholastics, myself among them, sailed into Manila Bay. Fr. Francisco “Fritz” Araneta was our superior. He was home after years of study abroad, and began presenting his country.

 

He pointed out a young woman, a legendary heroine, asleep on the mountains. He spoke of Corregidor Island, and told us of its fall. Part of the story he got from another Jesuit, Fr. Pacifico Ortiz, who had been there with President Manuel Quezon until they left with Gen. Douglas MacArthur. He told us there were sharks in the waters between Corregidor and Cavite, as if he expected us to jump in if he didn’t warn us. We saw nothing but green mountains and the blue sea. It was a wonderland.

 

We were in our early 20s. We would study philosophy at Berchmans College Cebu, then teach in one of the Ateneos before going on to theology. We had been 21 days on the old freighter Pacific Bear without seeing land, until we stopped at San Fernando, La Union, to unload the heavy-duty trucks intended for Ambuklao Dam.

 

I don’t remember much of the next few days. I recall visiting Intramuros and the immigration office there, and seeing the demolished walls of the city and the poor people everywhere, even on the site of the old cathedral. They were called “squatters” by everyone. I never dreamed I would spend most of my life working with these people.

 

At that time there were about 27 million Filipinos; now there are 93 million, more than thrice the 1953 figure. The extremely rapid population growth is arguably the most important historical fact of the last 60 years.

 

We were wearing white soutanas in public for the first time. We felt very odd, but the people didn’t seem to notice. I remember our trip to Cebu on the Basco, a small freighter, packed with people and cargo, chickens and pigs. All three days of the trip the people stared at us in our white soutanas and we stared at them; both sides were fascinated with what they saw. One in our group, Ed Spinello, had been a football player at Fordham University. He stood 5’9”, but he weighed at least 250 pounds. The people realized he never used the toilet. When he got up to walk around the ship, every eye followed him. Parents pulled their children out of his way.

 

Besides Spinello and myself there was Cal Poulin, who died in Cagayan de Oro in 2012. Asked once what he wanted on his tombstone, he said: “Here lies a Jesuit missionary of 60 years.” He died a year before that time was up. The fourth man was John Van Bemel, who left the Jesuits soon after ordination. We lost track of him. Spinello died shortly after ordination. Such are life’s vagaries.

 

We were fascinated by the way the mothers made “homes” out of the few square meters their family occupied amid all the cots and cargo in that ship. We were looking at families, not a crowd of individuals.

 

Flying fish followed us all the way with leaps of up to 20 meters. We saw the small islands scattered over the sea in their turquoise rings. We saw thunderstorms marching across the sea toward us on dark spindly legs. We were on our own; Father Araneta had stayed in Manila. For us it was a first-class adventure. Actually I think it was the love of adventure as much as the missionary spirit that moved us to volunteer for the missions in the first place.

 

We landed in Cebu on June 21, the feast of St. Aloysius Gonzaga. We knew the American scholastics who had gone ahead of us in 1951 and 1952. We met our Filipino classmates for the first time. Looking back now, I don’t see any way in which all Americans differed from all Filipinos. Some of each group loved philosophy, some found it torture. Some were interested in the fine arts, others were not.

 

We heard Ramon Magsaysay campaigning to become president at Fuente Osmeña. He said America would never give the weapons the Philippines needed to defeat its enemies (the Huks) “unless they saw the name Ramon Magsaysay at the bottom of the page.” He got a truly rousing reception in Cebu. Just four years later he flew from Cebu to his death.

 

One night not long after we arrived, I heard loud noises coming from the mountains behind the city. I left my room to see what it was. It sounded like people beating on pots and pans, and I saw rows of torches moving on the mountains. “What is it?” I asked the superstudious Filipino scholastic who lived next to me. He had a scholar’s interest in angels. Whatever problem came up in class, he related it to the angels: “What has this to say about the angels?”

 

He told me the people were making noise because they wanted the moon back. I hadn’t noticed the eclipse; nearly half the moon was gone and the night was darker. He said, “They believe the dragon took part of the moon and they want it back. If I were you, I’d stay in my room. Sometimes the people look for victims to sacrifice to the dragon. They prefer fair-skinned people. It’s about the light you see. Stay in your room.”

 

I stayed in my room until the dragon gave back the moon and the mountain people went to bed. My neighbor came and told me he was only kidding about the human sacrifice. It was the only time anyone can remember that he did something frivolous.

 

“What does it say about the angels?” I asked him. He laughed. It was the first time we saw him laugh out loud.

 

I once again thank the Filipino people, who have been angels mostly over the years.

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

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Not the ‘gates of hell,’ but worse

Commentary

By Denis Murphy

 

 

Manila is not the “gates of hell” Dan Brown described in his latest novel “Inferno.” If anything, it is worse. Brown and observers like him see only the shell of poverty, the part of it that is visible from a car or from a walk on the edge of an urban poor area near their hotel. They don’t know the truly awful scenes in the heart of the slums and they don’t know the people. And most Filipinos have little more real knowledge of the slums than our foreign friends do.

 

Foreigners and most Filipinos lack an understanding of why the slums are here, how little is done to help the urban poor, and how much courage and self-sacrificing love exist in the slums. Cardinal Chito Tagle and Pope Francis have urged us to listen to one another as a precondition for understanding one another: To understand all is to forgive all.

 

Yes, in the slums there are pimps, men ready to kill for P500, drug lords, child prostitutes, parents who encourage their children to become prostitutes; there are drunks, lazy people, opportunists, violent husbands, vultures who prey on the weak, and all types of bad characters. There are, however, as I have experienced in my 43 years of work in the Tondo-Baseco slums, men and women, especially women, of near-heroic love and unselfishness.

 

I also believe there are embers of compassion in all our people, so that a gesture of concern by a decent government or an engaged Church, or a group of young people, can fan the embers into flame and into genuine concern for the very poor. Why worry about what Dan Brown or others say? We will be judged on what we do to help the poor who are there before us, as Jesus promised they always would be.

 

Let me give an example of what embers of compassion look like and how these can be fanned into life.  We were driving on Aurora Boulevard in front of St. Joseph’s Church last week when we saw coming toward us, against the traffic, an older man, a scavenger, pushing a kariton that was piled high with the stuff he had gathered during the night. On top of everything was a cardboard box turned upside down, and balancing on the box were two small puppies. The box tilted this way and that and the puppies looked around for help. The man, who seemed to be in his sixties, was smiling at the dogs and reassuring them they were safe, and perhaps for a few hours at least he was smiling at life itself. After all, he had finished work and had earned his P150 or P200 for the night. He was on his way to the junk shop to sell his stuff and then he would head home for breakfast and bed with his puppies.

 

Then something remarkable happened: None of the drivers around us blew their horns at the man for coming against traffic and slowing them up in the rush hour. Ordinarily, these same drivers would be furious at a wrong-way driver. People have been shot for blocking traffic. Here no one was angry. They sympathized with the old man. Compassion was still alive.

Maybe the drivers liked the old man’s self-reliance and jaunty air in the face of poverty and old age. Maybe they liked his affection for the puppies. Whatever the reason, the drivers saw him as a good man in need of help. If there were a program for the old man, they would readily have signed on.

 

Let the old man stand as a symbol for the urban poor and the rural landless poor and the tribal people hustled out of their land by mining companies and others. The job of the government, the Church and ourselves, I believe, is to awaken the interest of all people in the poor of the country. Like the old man, most of the poor are decent, interesting people.

 

The poor need help. No one escapes poverty by himself or herself. Not Batman, Superman, or even the Irish superhero Finn McCool, who is so strong he can lift himself up by the scruff of his neck, can manage to get out of poverty unaided.

What might a program for the old scavengers and people like him be? We should note, first of all, that if he has a home, he is fortunate. There are hundreds of scavenger-families who sleep at night in or alongside their kariton. Let us talk about what can be done for them. At night they pull their wagons up on the sidewalk wherever they can and huddle together for the night, more like people in the Tabon Caves 50,000 years ago than residents of a modern city. They are liable to be beaten or robbed, or rousted by the police or by security guards, or well-off people who fear the presence of homeless people.

 

Suppose we set up camps around the city where the poor scavengers can come at night, where they will have water and be safe, where perhaps a medical person can examine the sick and the children can get a bite to eat, and maybe some tutoring. Can Ateneo de Manila University, Miriam College and the University of the Philippines open their parking lots at night to the kariton of the poor and homeless? The security guards are already in the schools to keep an eye on things. The homeless people will be safe and will leave in the early morning.

 

The schools can become homes of peace and compassion for the hundreds of young and old people who are literally homeless in the Cubao area.

 

What must be done?

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

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The poor didn’t benefit

Commentary
By Denis Murphy

Philippine Daily Inquirer

How did the midterm elections affect the urban poor? More than any other group, the poor need free elections to improve their lives, but the simple truth seems to be that in the last poll exercise they hardly benefited. It was partly their own doing.


The urban poor in the Philippines now number about 20 million, according to the UN Habitat. They are the fastest growing of poor sectors. They live in the larger cities, the great engines of the economy, but to paraphrase the Gospel, they are in but not of the great wealth found there. They are like the small fish along Australia’s Great Barrier Reef that clean parasites off the sharks, manta rays and other highly dangerous marine creatures. The big fish drop by these special “cleaning” areas when they feel the need, the little fish who love to eat parasites do a first-class cleaning job, even going into the gills and jaws of the sharks, then the big fish sail off, leaving the small fish with nothing in the great ocean but their parasites.

There was a sticker used in the election of 2010 that read: “In a democracy, reform comes from the ballots of the poor.” It expresses the classic belief of people organizing the poor, that if they can gather the poor into political parties that are informed and eager for change, they can win political power through elections, and then use the power to help the poor.

I don’t see that this happened in the last elections, except in very small areas of Manila, in very small ways. Still, elections remain the main political hope of the poor. Realistically, there is no other path to a decent life. But for now, the politicians who believe they can win the poor people’s votes at election time by giving them money and food, coopting their leaders and making endless airy promises, have been proven right once again.

Thousands of poor people have sold their votes. They have taken money in exchange for their free democratic votes that are the key to the locks and chains that hold them in poverty. People who sell their votes lose their self-respect and agree with the powerful that change is not needed, or possible. Taking money encourages the power-brokers to manipulate the poor all the more.

Why should anyone help such poor people? But before we start blaming the poor, we should remember that while among the poor there may be pimps, men of violence, drunkards, as well as lazy, greedy and vulgar people, there are even more decent, hardworking and caring ones.

There are many good people among the poor. I once saw a heavily pregnant woman walking barefoot through her slum community. Her dress was stretched so tight around her swollen belly that we feared her child could be hurt. She had no money to buy a more suitable dress. She had nothing to offer her baby except herself. All her life she will sacrifice for her children though she is hungry, unhappy and often a victim of violence. She will never give up on them.

There are innocent victims. Think of the 12-year-old prostitutes who work along the piers of Tondo at night. They charge P30 ($.75 cents) for touching (pakalog, groping) and P300 ($7) for sex, often in the back of a truck, with the men who hang out at the piers. When you see two or three of the girls together, you are aware they still have the thin legs and the awkward, shy stance of children. They should be playing childhood games, not waiting for customers.

The great reason for helping the urban poor is, of course, that God is with the poor. God is not with them because they are good and deserving of help any more than He was with the Israelites because they were good. He helps the poor, as the Prophet Ezekiel tells us, just as He helped the Israelites, not because they are good, but for the sake of His Own Holy Name.

At the risk of trivializing a serious matter, here is how things may work. A smart fish who has traveled outside his or her own sea—someone like Nemo, perhaps—one day advises the small fish-cleaners: “You don’t have to do what the sharks and manta rays want. You are not slaves. Organize yourselves, elect leaders and tell the sharks you are tired of your parasite diet, and you want the sharks and others to bring a variety of food when they come, or no cleaning.”

“Suppose they just eat us instead?” one of the small fish asks.

“If they eat you, there will be no one to remove the parasites, and that will pain them more and more. Don’t worry, stick together, and they’ll do what you want,” the smart fish says.

So the small fish stand firm and confront the sharks and the other great fish. The small fish win, and they now live with dignity and have expanded their services to include beauty treatments, massage, and organizing advice. The fish who started it all is now a Senator of the Sea.

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