Far From Neutral Notions - Philippine politics, culture and stuff

Stop. I want you to close your eyes, I’m gonna tell you a story. Well, my story.

There’s no ending yet, and not much of a beginning. It’s mostly just now.

Look around, wherever you may be. I’m in an office somewhere in Makati; right now the boss isn’t here so I can talk to you. I have a bunch of deadlines hanging over my head but that’s ok.

Outside my window I can see people walking, some running. They’re out on their lunch break, the lucky ones. Those not as lucky are walking away, holding their resumés, Preoccupied. Just another day in the Makati, I suppose, but I wouldn’t really know.

Today’s the first time I actually looked.

There are people outside the door - co workers, I suppose I should call them - that I never said two words to. I don’t even know their names.

It’s almost sad.

On my usual route home - MRT to GMA7, jeep to the church, short walk down the street - I see them. People. There’s a store by the corner street where I always get off, I buy my cigarettes there because they sell for only 29 pesos. Further down there’s a design studio - clothes, I’m assuming - that’s almost always empty. Then there’s the condominium I’ve heard is owned by a former actor, lots of people coming in and out. There’s a souped up, funkified, electrified, pimped out Ford Expedition with lime green metallic paint and fire decals with a government plate, and I wonder how the government can afford to pimp their rides sometimes. Further down the street is another sari-sari store that I don’t buy from much because they always run out of my cigarette brand. Then there’s the house with the two old ladies always sitting by the gate, watching, and I sometimes wonder what’s going through their minds, how it must feel like to be that old, and what they think of me and the other passer-by. Then there’s the house with the motion detectors and high walls whose spotlight illuminates the street at night whenever someone walks by.

I don’t know their names, but sometimes I wonder what their lives must be like, what their arguments are about during dinner, and the dreams they dream when the nightmares of being awake are over.

These are, as the song goes, the people in my neighborhood. Ordinary for the most part, extraordinary because they are living, breathing, loving, thinking beings. And I love thier lives, I love their uniqueness, I love their hopes and their dreams and their passions and ther thoughts.

And everytime I think about how the world - their world, your world, my world - might change with one woman’s insatiable lust for power, I am afraid. Not of the change, but of the crushed hopes and dying dreams and onset of despair that can’t help but come. I fear the dying of our shared yet individual reality, the magically mundane perception of our now.

We live in a Macondo of our own, where we are doomed to repeat past and forgotten mistakes and with it’s own tragedies and triumphs. It is not abstract ideals, slogans that politicians can twist left and right according to the circumstances, that I fear for. It is not the dying of freedom, or of liberty, or of democracy. No righteous rage against the dying of the light. None of these.

It’s actually very simple and very selfish. I fear for the characters in my story - that when I turn to the next chapter their future might be ashes - and I fear for my own future. I fear for the people in my neighborhood, becuase I’m one of them.

And I fear the epilogue that GMA will write.

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