“If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.” - (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar)
In school we are taught to count balls, sticks and squares. As we grow, we learn to see numbers differently. Politicians translate them as votes, businessmen add them as profits, gamblers divine them as lucky combination, teachers and students present them as grades, and others treat them as they are – mere numbers, nothing more or less.
And how do we see the 193 (and still counting) bodies found dead in Payatas? If we see it as 7 less to become 200, fine we are correct. However much as we would like to know our different views, we would never question those except our challenge to check those standpoints with our own values and conscience.
Much have been said and written about the Payatas tragedy. We have had enough of the upbraiding and bickering of the government officials and politicos. We have heard too many of the pleas and cries of the aggrieved families who lost more than their sons, daughters, members of the families but their faces among the faceless wishful thinkers in the land of promises they consider their own. The land that feeds them has become the land that devours them. It is the same and where they built their houses with their dreams of a new life in the city, where they dig their living searching for a bottle of genie or lamp of luck everyday with unfailing vision of a better tomorrow than today. Each strike of the kalahig that pierces through the depth of the land is like stabbing their misfortune in life, hurting, lethargic yet healing, and forever hoping. Each material it hooks goes with the desire of having more, putting it in a basket of filling weight of surviving, carrying it where there maybe more. Paradoxically they subsist on something the city can live without. And they live nonetheless like us.
We are different from them. Every day we go out with our kalahig, in our search for magis. We all look for the bottle of genie, and we oftentimes are fooled to go to the city in our attempt to find the lamp of luck. We are lured to the illusory lights of the city, brightness hard to ignore, too inviting to explore yet in its glitter, we are blinded by the danger and price of leaving our home and living away from it.
Payatas is a home to a vagabond or to those who consider every place a home but definitely not a home to our children, our parents, our brothers and sisters, and our family. Still some people choose to live there, making it their home. Indeed, the rain chooses no stone to wet, and wet rolling stone gathers no moss.
Out of 193, have you given it a thought of how many might be Bicolanos? Just a thought.
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