Here’s a symptom that many of our kababayans are resorting to desperation just to survive the intensifying hellish existence that we all call everyday life.
Not only have the number of jeepney-riding beggars (disparagingly lumped as "Badjaos” by everyone else, which to me is kind of insulting to the real Badjaos, but that’s another story) dramatically increased during the recent holiday season, but it now appears that some of them are turning to violence due to the increasing indifference of jeepney passengers.
In Manila, a man was arrested after allegedly boarding a jeepney, asking for alms, and then threatening those who didn’t give him money with an icepick. (His lame excuse, according to news reports: he was asking for money to give to his girlfriend!)
Also in Manila, last Tuesday, February 19 (as of the writing of this article), a man took two employees inside a printing shop hostage "following a dispute with his employers over his earnings," which amounted to P20,000.
Only when he was handed the money did the man surrender to authorities, according to news reports.
The rise of hostage-taking incidents in the past few days (although authorities are wont to play them down as “isolated incidents”), to me, reflect the stark contradiction between what the government says and the actual realities on the ground.
Amid all the hype and press media releases about economic growth, decreasing unemployment and underemployment, the fact is that the average wage-earner still finds it hard to make ends meet in their everyday lives.
Remember what this newsmagazine once said in its banner story about an average person needing P242 a day just to eat three square meals?
Here’s an indisputable fact: a desperate economy results in people taking desperate measures to survive – which, in this case, meant crime.
At this point I’m reminded of what a former hostage-taker commented after the infamous Quirino Grandstand bus hostage-taking in 2010 that left scores of victims dead, along with the hostage-taker.
Jun Ducat, it can be recalled, also took a busload of children hostage at the Quirino Grandstand sometime in 2008, a case which fortunately ended with him surrendering peacefully with none of his hostages hurt.
By the time the 2010 hostage-taking had occurred, Ducat, as far as I can recall, had been freed and was back in his old job as a daycare teacher (or something like that; if my memory serves me correctly, his hostages were children from a daycare center that he ran in Manila).
When asked by the media about his reaction to the bloody carnage at the Quirino Grandstand that was broadcast live to the nation, the former hostage-taker has this to say: more and more Jun Ducats will resort to violence to express their outrage at this corrupt, inefficient and morally bankrupt system that benefits only a few.
As a saying goes, “those who make peaceful revolutions impossible will make violent revolutions inevitable.”
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