SUCH A BOXING EVENT CAN BLOW STRAIGHT at the face.
Of the millions of Filipinos who were enthralled by the fight between our very own Manny Pacquiao and Mexico’s Erik Morales, 17 percent were hungry, 12.9 percent were jobless, 26.1 percent were underemployed and a whopping 57 percent felt they were poor. The rest who didn’t watch were either curiously uninterested or were not within a day’s travel to a television set or an electrical outlet.
First things first: we join the chorus of accolades from every corner of the country being heaped upon the man from General Santos City. He is amazing, and it is equally remarkable how he manages to capture the heart and imagination of an entire people. He’s going to be rich, too, deservingly.
This is not the case for many of those who followed the fight on TV and radio.
They may be rich in spirit, but poor in almost everything else. We thank Manny for bringing pride and honor to the country. But we can thank him for another thing—that is for making us forget our troubles for a good 30 minutes (an hour and a half if you count the commercials).
We were such in high spirits that we didn’t care about the pain of hearing the unmistakable voice of our embattled President in a phone patch made immediately after the fight, in someone’s obvious attempt to capitalize on the Filipino boxer’s evident popularity.
But this momentary relief can also be as cruel as putting off the execution of a condemned man; it only prolongs the agony.
As we turn off our TV sets, a tide of problems comes rushing back. For the common Filipino, it would be a question of how to put decent food on the table, how to pay runaway electricity and water bills, and how to cope with the perpetual assault of oil price hikes, which are the economic equivalent of the baker’s yeast—it makes the cost of everything rise (except labor’s). At the same time, we anxiously watch the countdown to the implementation of the 12-percent EVAT on Feb. 1, which in fact means an EVAT rate 20-percent higher. And we wonder how much more “belt tightening” the government expects us to make in the name of “growth and progress.”
—ISA ARTAJO, chair, Student Alliance for the Advancement of Democratic Rights in UP (STAND UP) via e-mail
