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New Year's Eve "Common Dream"
On New Year’s Eve, one asks: Did the 57 women, journalists and passers-by, massacred in Maguindanao, share a common dream with Mayor Andal Ampatuan Jr, his gunmen --even the backhoe operator who shoveled dirt over their savaged bodies, before absconding? All dreamed “to comb grey hair”. That line is from Irish poet and 1923 Nobel Laureate William Butler Yeats. The 57 will never “comb grey hair.” In the new year, that number could still rise. Leila de Lima has the Commission on Human Rights ferreting out hidden grave sites. In 2010, CHR could verify, or scrap, persistent reports of “Chainsaw murders” and “Backhoe killings”. First week of 2010, Judge Jocelyn Solis-Reyes, will gavel start of the trial for Amapatuan Jr. at amp Crame. By second week, Senior State Prosecutor Leo Dacera III and team will have sifted counter affidavits from some of over 640 implicated in the slaughter. Who will squeal as state witnesses? “This only is denied to God: the power to undo the past,” Agathon wrote. The shabby past of Ferdinand Marcos’ subservient Marcos Supreme Court stokes gender awareness in the masscare. Tiene cojones, ( “She has balls”), people said admiringly of the late Justice Cecilia Munoz-Palma. With the late Justice Claudio Teehankee, Palma didn’t flinch in ruling against dictator Marcos –who appointed her. The Ampatuans don’t stand in the dock alone. Unseen but peering over their shoulders are 132 shadowy private armies. That’s Defense Secretary Norberto Gonzales tally. They thrived with the longest-serving president’s beediction. Other wraiths at the trial are these mercenary gunmen’s patrons. North Cotabato vice-governor Manny Pinol is right on the button to say: the main beneficiary of Maguindanao warlords is President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Andal Sr’s influence…”reached great heights after he engineered a lopsided victory in Maguindanao for President Arroyo,” Pinol wrote in the Inquirer “Political anointment” enabled Amaptuans to down-load Internal Revnue Allotments and fund chunks from agriculture, agrian reform, public works. Accountability is not in the Ampatuan vocabularly. Pinol noted. Is accountability a factor other warlord fiefdoms? Were you born yesterday? Government, by the gun, never ushered in stability and growth. “For ordinary folk, the ultimate new year question is simpler,” the Sun Star said. “Will life become better for us? Will more of us live to comb grey hair?” “I urge you on this--–which I think is wisdom---that if you find you can’t make seventy, don’t you go“, Mark Twain joshed at his 70th birthday bash in 1905. Life expectancy for a Maguindanaoan is a little over 56 years. It is 17 years shorter than the 73 years for La Union residents. In Hong Kong, many get to comb grey locks since life expectancy crests at 82. How many kids died so Ampatuan Senior could gamble in Las Vegas? Truncated life spans is inevitable in a province where rulers own 23 mansions and treat Internal Revenue Allotments as a private pork barrel. In Maguindanao, 44 out of 100 residents, are “no-read-no-write. That’s the highest functional illiteracy rate for 77 provinces, says Philippine Human Development Report. In Laguna, 7 are illiterates. Forty four of every 100 Maguindanao residents, lack potable water. In South Cotabato, nine don’t have safe water. Andal Jr barked orders to gunmen by radio. But telephone line density, in his province, is 0.1 for every 100 households. Comparative density for Southern Tagalog is 8.4. Warlord blatant luxury explains why hair turn prematurely grey. The bottom 10 provinces in human development, starting from the tailender are: Sulu, Maguindanao, Tawi-Tawi, Baislan, Masbate, Zamboanga del Norte, Sarangani, Western followed by Eastern Samar and Lanao del Sur. Compared internationally, these 10 would be bracketed between: Mauritania on one end and Krygzstan, on the other. Maguindanao is wedged between Swaziland and Ghana. The poor try to break free from this indigence quaqmire. Many fail. Reasons include: lack of jobs; big families, shabby schooling, weak institutions; embedded corruption and kin systems.“The poor remain poor because they can not borrow against future earnings to invest in education, skills, new crops,” Asian Development Bank notes. This portrait of penury traps is not new. The brutality of the massacre merely shoved it into the headlines. That jolted a people anesthetized by Wow-Wow-Wee type soaps. More became aware of what Asian Development Bank calls “poverty webs”. “These are the intricate pathways from adverse health and education conditions to poverty and back, within and across generations,” noted S, Qumbo, A, Kraft and J, Capuno in a UP School of Economics study. Poverty webs pass penury from generation to another. Malnourished mothers give birth to wizened children whose IQs are often impaired. Roughly, 20 percent of households live in chronic poverty, About 67 percent of poor household heads never got to high school. “The next generation may well attain the same level of educational attainment….The economic potential of the next decade is jeopardized.” Indeed, we plod, as Chirstina Rosetti put it, in “a weary land of weak creatures, weary of labor, weary of selves, weary of hope deferred.”A country of deferred hopes didn’t do away with Ferdie, Erap just to get Gloria back in the new year. Email: juanlmercado@gmail.com |
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