It’s in the news and is all the buzz amongst the mutual high-fivin’ titas of Manila who are reveling in the idea that they have once again scored a Great Woke Cancellation. University of the Philippines Executive Vice President Teodoro J. Herbosa had recently tendered his resignation. News site Interaksyon “reports” that this was “after his tweets earned backlash from some Twitter users”. This “report”, however, failed to mention what specific political bloc or clique of “Twitter users” were the primary sources of this “backlash”.
“Reporter” Jeline Malasig who authored the Interaksyon “report” goes into some detail on Herbosa’s offense to the “decent” mob writing further…
“Death by ‘community pantry.’ I told you so!” he tweeted with an accompanying screenshot of a report of News5.
“Mali ito. Don’t even try to defend this is right. Daming mag ka COVID19 diyan!” Herbosa added.
He also shared screengrabs of a video featuring the incident and wrote, “Tama po ba ito?”
Herbosa was referring to the death of 67-year-old Rolando dela Cruz who was part of an enormous crowd that gathered around the ill-fated community pantry organised by ABS-CBN starlet Angel Locsin on the occasion of her birthday last week. One can therefore reasonably argue that Dela Cruz’s death was a case of death by community pantry. If there had been no community pantry on that day, then Mr Rolando dela Cruz would likely still be alive today. Simple logic, right?
| SUPPORT INDEPENDENT SOCIAL COMMENTARY! Subscribe to our Substack community GRP Insider to receive by email our in-depth free weekly newsletter. Opt into a paid subscription and you'll get premium insider briefs and insights from us. Subscribe to our Substack newsletter, GRP Insider! Learn more |
The more important point to be made here is that the notion of Death by Community Pantry can be thought of as one that describes the overall macro character of Philippine society. Community pantry disasters such as in the case of Locsin’s “birthday pantry” are microcosms of the way Filipinos generally regard the nature of their personal fortunes. To the average Filipino, bad fortune is a punishment from God and good fortune is a reward from God. They manifest this fate-based view of life in their politics ascribing good and bad things to the rich and powerful. They move like flocks of sheep prompted by the “shepherd” figures ingrained in their collective psyches by their medieval religion and dishonest politics.
The “good shepherds” that organised these community pantries and the “evangelists” who drummed up the media spectacles around these are arguably what pulled in the dangerous throngs that put lives and property at huge risk. In her recent blog post “Privilege, pantries, and the poor”, Opposition thought leader Katrina Stuart-Santiago asserts that “encouraging the poor to travel from their communities, with the little cash that they have, so they might fall in line for a pantry where they are implicitly told to take little, is just unkind. It is also reckless.” She writes how this unkindness grew out of “a romanticization of the poor that is borne of a privileged gaze”. She continues — perhaps making reference to an ironically capitalist impulse to scale or industrialise an initiative that, by its very nature, is best kept small — to describe the flawed thinking applied to these so-called community pantries that ultimately turned them to the sad perversions we see today…
The decision to raise funds or ask for goods beyond the community of one pantry, and inadvertently encouraging the poor to come in droves to the pantries they see on TV, defeats the pantry’s purpose. You lose “community” and the notion of assisting your neighbors; you lose the time and energy you need to forge connections within the community, across the privileged and the poor, towards standing in solidarity, beyond this act of charity.
It is evident here and in the similar manner that Filipinos, their “activists”, and their politicians routinely turn what were originally good ideas into abominations as a continuous death by good intention. Consider then; community pantries started out as such — good intentions. Somebody died as a result of that good intention turned bad after the people in the jackboots goose-stepped into the picture waving their ideological banners. Death by community pantry. Only in the Philippines.
If all those self-appointed “virtues” that Filipinos take pride in really delivered real outcomes — our prayerfulness, bayanihan spirit, generosity to “the poor”, and all the chi chi man-for-others stuff taught to us up that Hill — were actually worth the hundreds of thousands of pesos parents of today’s “thought leaders” paid the Catholic Mafia to shove down their kids’ throats then, surely, the Philippines would be the world’s richest country by now. Yet to this day Filipinos continue to shrug their collective shoulders asking: Where are the results?
Oh, to be so educated and yet turn out to be so unkind — and so reckless.
benign0 is the Webmaster of GetRealPhilippines.com.
Which is why I choose to be Buddhist in this Catholic majority country
But then again if the Philippines was once a Buddist majority country then before the Spanish arrived in our country 500 years ago that brought about the Spanish colonization in our land, then will the Filipino Buddist would survive the Spanish insurrection that the Spanish government at that time in which they’d ordered to forced the natives to convert to Christianity or face persecution just like what they’d did in their former Spanish colonies in Latin America? I doubt they won’t.
To me, the death of the old man at a queue represents the risks that naturally come with life. COVID-19 is there, you don’t want to risk getting sick with it. But stay at home, you may not be able to get food, so you have to go out, if not to go to charity projects or community pantries, to work and expose yourself to risk while doing so. If COVID doesn’t get you, there’s the illnesses you already have, like diabetes, heart problems and other things. It’s basically a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation now, which is not always fatal, but can be.
People believe that if we all “pull together,” go on massive charity programs, or centralize production like communists want, we can 100% conquer this difficulty of life. No, time and again it is proven that in man vs. nature, nature always wins. Plans we make are never 100% guaranteed to succeed. You can’t blame anyone for failure unless they intentionally want to kill someone, which you have to prove with some effort.
And that is the problem with people, they want to blame someone for natural deaths. For example, if the case of Christopher McCandless happened in this country, there will be finger pointing on who is to blame. But you can’t put nature on trial or jail it for deaths.
Yes, the old man’s death could have been prevented, but perhaps it happened so that we could be alerted to the risks that people had missed in the first place. So now, measures will be put in place to prevent it from happening again (including making sure old people don’t go out, if the “below-15, above-65 shouldn’t go out” rule is still in effect). People indeed should take responsibility. Yet if nature is really trying to kill us even now, there will be a point where you can’t even blame the government despite its incompetence.
Simplistic solutions that fail to take into account inherent risks are usually the result of a failure to understand and define the problem clearly. It is obvious that those who were quick to polticise these initiatives and open them to being turned into instruments of virtue signalling by dishonest “activists” had no stake even in at least thinking far ahead enough to ensure these don’t create more problems on top on the ones they aimed to solve.
The intent is clearly flawed at best and dishonest at worst. The poor folk who flocked to these community pantries are like the “retweets” and “likes” influencers bait when posting their woke tweets. Just a scoring mechanism and not much else.
“To me, the death of the old man at a queue represents the risks that naturally come with life. ”
If that is so, what are we supposed to do with our brains? We should figure our way out of those risks (or atleast minimize them) and learn from experience.
Here’s the LGU’s part of the story with Barangay Chairman Chito Valmocina
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w3p1OUzidoY