Thousands have promised to demonstrate on Sunday to protest against the deaths of the Hong Kong tourists in the bus hi jacked in Manila. The profound loss and sadness which Hong Kongers have shared over the murders of their compatriots has been touching. The rallying of a commuity behind the beareved has been laudable.
But what is it exactly they are demonstrating against? Surely not death itself which will come untimely to us as it wills, mindless of location. They cannot be demonstrating against the also dead killer, the aggrieved and clearly crazed Mendoza. There would be no point in that. Heavily armed disaffected, individuals can be found everywhere, not least in North America. If you care to add it up, quite a number of Hong Kong natives will have been lost to people like that over time.
What they will really be protesting against will be the Philippines itself and whilst they would be uncomfortable with that simplification and deny they had anything against Filipinos en masse, it is what the Philippines is as an organisation which is making them really angry. Sad to say, in protesting against that, they are wasting their time.
The South China Morning Post’s editorial the morning after the shooting led the frustration and the futility. It called the killings a ‘wake up call’ to the Philippine government. You might as well send a wake up call to a clown fish. It is already awake in its way, swimming inside its poisonous anemone in a tropical sea to what purpose we cannot tell. Its memory span is very short. Unlike the Bourbons, it learns nothing and remembers nothing either.
Those who have discovered more about the Philippines than its potential for a very cheap vacation will know that its wealth is held by a hundred or so landowning clans for whom the legislature is a club and who make up most the government including this president and his predecessor and his mother and his father and many more before him.
These families are fractious, jealous and venegeful in their cornering of power. They bowl along with poverty and are undisturbed by violence. They are resilient and adaptable. Bowel moving homicide statistics and comic opera catastrophes do not shame them in the way they manipulate government. They are little bothered that the peasantry is not educated or equipped to do anything very efficiently.
Nowhere these days should Marxism and Maoism find more traction than the Philippines. There are attempts at that but we are told that the ordinary Filipinos with a well developed sense of the absurd and an attachment to a tinsel headed version of Roman Catholicism in coral reef colours, will have none of it.
The demonstrators must recognize that the Filipina maids they walk by on Sunday can only be blamed for one thing. These working poor have not summoned the resources or sufficient bloodlust to make revolution and sweep the clans away. In fact, if I was a demonstrator walking past these women I might feel a little confused if not downright silly. I am a demonstrating against a system whose haplessness killed my compatriots but which also makes these women poor enough and available to us to be our maids- whom we take gladly on the cheap.
Demonstrating doesn’t meet all offences. In this case, contemplate or pray for the dead, commiserate with the bereft- then let it go.
