We must never surrender

By Al S. Mendoza

 

WE remain gripped by the virus scare, stalling many plans and actions of both public and private sectors.

Practically all of the government’s concerns address the COVID-19 pandemic bedeviling the world for nearly five months now.

Our poor folk aren’t only losing their jobs, they are also fast losing hope, if not going hungry.

With livelihoods virtually vanishing into thin air, there is hardly any food on the table for many of our hapless brethren.  God have mercy.

The government is up to its neck in borrowings in a bid to provide cash assistance to the poorest of the poor.

President Duterte himself has said “we don’t have money anymore.”

He was just joking, of course.

No government in the world can be broke at any given time.

Other governments, if not the World Bank or other world lenders, will always come to the rescue.

The government is like a river: it keeps flowing.  With money.

Only in war times that money flow is on a virtual halt.

Even the middle class has started to feel the pinch.

With many factories and establishments—including restaurants, resorts, hotels, beauty salons and even barber shops—closing as a result of severely dwindling customers, many of our investors and capitalists are being forced to look somewhere.

Well, they are not really affected as seriously as our working class.

The moneyed class will always have a deep pocket to rely on.

Their vaults will remain bursting with cash, enough to give them five lifetimes at least.

They will ride the storm by just staying in their villas, vacation houses, sipping wine as they watch the world go round—waiting for the sun to shine again and to resume amassing wealth again.

Meanwhile, our toiling masses of people are stuck in their thatched huts mostly, with almost nowhere to go, and nothing to do except plant camote all over again?

That’s how unfair life is.

Each time a calamity strikes, it is the poor that absorb the brunt of suffering.

Thus, in these perilous times, we just have to be creative to stay afloat.

Some displaced jeepney drivers have started farming, many of them doing backyard gardening for vegetables to tide them over.

I saw a bus driver selling coconut juice as well as fresh buko meat on the sidewalk.

“The income is small but better than nothing,” he said, still wearing a smile amid the crisis.

Some have turned to begging and even scrounging for leftovers in fast-food chains and we can’t blame them.

“Better than resorting to crime, like stealing or swindling,” said a welder I know who got laid off.

My tailor, virtually bereft of customers, is now busy sewing face masks.

“Come to think of it,” he said.  “I am now earning more than what I used to earn before the virus came.”

One must really be creative to survive the trying times.

Augment that with self-reliance and you will never go hungry and miserable amid the pandemic.

For, while the virus, unseen by the naked eye and is very deadly indeed, remains active in the absence of a vaccine against it, we must never surrender in our resolve to survive the challenge.

God, whoever you conceive him to be, is watching, listening. Always.

So that it will help, surely, if we continue to pray and next hope that everything, in God’s time, will be fine.

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