Under the volcano July 20, 2006

QUITE uncannily, the front page of the Inquirer last Tuesday told a story that went well beyond the individual stories contained there. Taken together, those stories gave the nation to see the true state of the nation, complete with a most graphic and startling image. That image may be captioned: "Under the volcano."

The volcano in this case is both literal and metaphorical. The literal volcano that is all set to explode is Mayon. It's been smoking this past week, regaling or intimidating the mortals below with its deadly fireworks. Folk there recall that the last time Mayon blew its top, which was in 1993, it devastated the land, killing people and livestock andburying crops in rock and dust.

Still, they persist in staying there now despite pleas for them to evacuate. Why is that? Well, I remember that when the Ultra tragedy happened, several interviewers asked me where I thought the Filipinos' passion for gambling came from. From many things, I said, but chief of them from desperation. It's not just our money we gamble with, it's ourlives. Look at the folk living at the foot of volcanoes, like Mayon. They are making the high-stakes bet that somehow when the volcano gets fretful it will eventually calm down or spare them when it blows. What else is there? They do not leave and the volcano explodes, they die, by hellfire. They go and the volcano explodes, they die anyway, from hunger.

That is how the poor, who are most Filipinos, live today.

The figurative volcano is the one everyone was talking about before some of you were born, which was before martial law. That is the "social volcano." Everyone warned then that it was all set to explode, the magma in it being violently roiled by two things. One was the "spectaculardivide between rich and poor," which daily became even more spectacular. Two, was oppression and injustice in the form of abusive landlords and employers, deaf judges and a corrupt government.

Those things don't just remain today, they've gotten spectacularly worse. Today, the oppression and injustice are supplied in concentrated and venomous form by the person who is about to apprise the nation of the state of the nation. The injustice has to do with that person having deprived the real winner of the last elections, Fernando Poe Jr., hisrightful seat in Malacañang. And the oppression has to do with the efforts to stifle the truth, which has taken a murderous turn in past months.

Our front-page story last Tuesday about that not very funny joke, Joc-joc Bolante, reminds us that the burning issue in the country today remains Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's legitimacy and her frenetic efforts to douse the fire by preventing every witness to the lie, ally or enemy, from blurting out what he knows. And our story about the investigation of the people behind Danny Lim's "coup" shows how the injustice is being corrected and the oppression resisted. If Lim's action was a coup at all, then it was,or would have been, the most popular coup in the world. Unlike past coup attempts, it wasn't one that expected to meet public consternation, it was one that expected to meet universal jubilation.

The spectacular divide between rich and poor was right there in our story about the plight of the overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in Lebanon, apart from our story about the folk at the foot of Mayon. Before martial law, everyone was saying that a situation not unlike France before 1789, where a Marie Antoinette could afford to throw cake to the hungry, could never hold. It was ripe for revolution. The social volcano was far too advancedin its fury, it was going to explode.

It did in part, but not in whole. Two things held it back. One was the petrodollars, the Ali Baba treasure the Opec countries dumped into the Western banks, which the banks in turn dumped into the hands of Third World tyrants, including Marcos. By mortgaging the future through loans, Marcos managed to calm down restiveness throughout the 1970s. His doom came when the petrodollars stopped flowing into the banks and the banksstarted collecting. He suddenly saw he was in worse shape than Faust: Banks are more implacable collectors on debts than Beelzebub.

The second was overseas work. That would prove to be the longer-lasting safety valve, one that has not only lasted till today but has become the country's very source of salvation. It's no longer just the safety valve, it's the engine itself. I remember someone asking me once in a forum abroad, "What's your country's main export?" I answered, "People." He laughed, thinking I was joking. I kept a straight face.

But as our story about the plight of our OFWS in Lebanon shows, that safety valve, or engine, has a steep price to pay. The source of salvation is also the source of perdition -- for the saviors more than the saved. It is paid for by alienation, rape, death by bomb or bullet abroad and broken families at home. Indeed, as the case of Lebanon shows, there are limits to how far we can send our whole population to find glory abroad while fleeing Gloria at home. The global labor market is contracting, not expanding, while the competition is expanding, not contracting. We may have no limits to how far we are willing to turn from doctor to nurse, from engineer to canal-dredgers (don't you just wish our lawyers and politicians would do the patriotic thing and turn into drivers and forklift operators in Saudi?) but other countries have limits to how much of them they want. The Arab countries may also recall that not too long ago the head of this country was egging other countries to follow America and invade Iraq. Muammar Qaddafi might forget, but the Iraqis and Iranians won't.

There's the true plight of the Filipino, there's the true state of hisnation:
Under the volcano.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=10712