DISILUSIONADA

By Carla Montemayor

It is all well and good to expose snobbery and shame those who indulge in it, but what if they turn out to be us?

I’m jumping into the Malu Fernandez melee just as it’s supposed to be ending with her apology and her resignation from the publications she wrote for. A triumph for overseas Filipinos and bloggers, it has been hailed.

But it doesn’t end there, does it? This isn’t just about OFWs. Pinoy angst about class divides has been simmering for a long, long time. Two decades of "democracy" only seem to have made it worse. You need only to look at how names for the poor have evolved: they used to be masa (a political, though somewhat clinical, description of the majority), now they’re jologs (poverty as synonymous with bad taste).

So let me, for a few moments, join in the lynching of the Anti-Poor.

First of all, a "socialite" called "Malu" is an oxymoron. Wrong name, wrong pedigree. Second, she can’t write. Hell, she can’t even tell prejudice from wit, which is just like being unable to tell your ass from your esophagus. Third, if she wants to avoid OFWs, she should fly to the moon. She went on a holiday to Greece, a country full of Filipino domestic workers and sailors. And Dubai—duh. "I wanted to slash my wrist at the thought of being trapped in a plane with all of them," she wrote. Travel with a blade, Ms. Fernandez.

Okay, that feels good but it was too easy. This controversy affords us a good opportunity to unpack our hypocrisies, mine included. So having indulged ourselves, let’s now turn to the more difficult questions.

But first, my class credentials, which I think give me a unique vantage point: I’m neither rich nor poor. My parents are retired professionals, who only one generation ago were poor. So poor that my mother and her siblings had to dig for clams for their dinner. All seven of them went to university, two of them becoming lawyers, one a physicist. My father’s paternal relatives are landlords but his mother was a peasant. He sent himself to law school by working at the Manila pier. My folks clawed their way out of poverty, sent us to good schools and thus gave us a leg up. Of that, I am fiercely proud. I believe that many Pinoy families got to be middle class this way.

Today I find myself in England as an overseas Filipino, though not quite an overseas Filipino worker. In fact I’m poorer than most OFWs because I have gone back to being a student. However, I have traveled more extensively than most Pinoys and I have been an activist all of my adult life. My family, my education and my politics have conspired to make me egalitarian to the point of neurosis. As far as I’m concerned, I am as good as anyone else, no matter how much more or less money they may have.

The condescension—the hatred, even—that I see among the upper classes in the Philippines towards the poor makes me nauseous. The only country I have seen with worse social cleavages is Nepal, where’s there’s a caste system. Elitism has become unfashionable in most places but in the Philippines it flourishes like a colony of bacteria in a petri dish of shit.

There’s something surreal and gut-churning about the rich and pseudo-rich lounging about in faux bistros, sipping lattes, pretending to be somewhere cosmopolitan when they’re in a city festering with garbage, surrounded by slums and crawling with starving, prostituted children. I’m not saying that we be paralyzed by these grim realities, though some level of social conscience would make the situation a little less disturbing. Instead we have a callous elite blaming the poor for social ills and political turmoil.

One example that makes me furious every time: calling the poor lazy (and therefore responsible for their own misery). Lazy? Working 12 hours a day and earning barely enough to feed your family is not laziness, it’s injustice. Another prejudice that ticks me off, as in the Fernandez article: What’s wrong with being a maid? For me it is a source of pride that my countrywomen are willing to scrub toilets for a living but will never beg. That’s way honorable compared to the drunks and junkies hereabouts who would rather leach money off working people.

What do Philippine upper classes have to be proud of anyway? In other countries, there have been "modernizing elites" who kick-started reforms to defeat chronic poverty and move their societies into the 21st century. In the Philippines, our leaders—who have always been from the elite, including Erap-- can’t even do land reform properly. So who’s lazy and greedy and inept?

Malu Fernandez is not an isolated phenomenon; her views are shared by many of her ilk. Just a couple of months ago, there was an entry in fashion journalist Cecile Zamora’s blog suggesting proper etiquette for beggars whom she found offensive. All in jest, she claimed. I’ve read another ludicrous website suggesting that poor Pinoys be sterilized to prevent them from breeding further. I didn’t hear too many objections to these.

The indignation that spread across the blogosphere over this issue is heartening, though some of the ripostes are worrying: Malu Fernandez is not truly posh because if she were, she wouldn’t be flying coach. She’s fat. She has fake boobs. And if her breasts turn out to be genuine, would that make her insults more acceptable? What if she had a proper old rich surname, was slim and flying first class? Would the responses have been as vicious? I suspect not. Because that is the flipside of the snobbery coin: the admiration and obeisance extended by the lower and middle classes towards the truly rich.

Let’s examine the behavior and aspirations of the middle classes in particular. (And by middle classes, I mean the professional classes, as well as those with a certain level of education and income.) There’s the fixation with brands and designer clothing. The brandishing of late-model mobile phones as status symbols. Extolling the lifestyles of the wealthy. Dyed hair and nose jobs to get the mestiza look. Speaking in phony American accents. Scorning and ridiculing the jologs. Ever seen the disgraceful treatment of maids in many middle class households?

It is all well and good to expose snobbery and shame those who indulge in it, but what if they turn out to be us? We go a few rungs up the socio-economic ladder and we’re aping the worst traits of those above us. If we really abhor class prejudice and inequality, why don’t we reject those values ourselves?

Which is not to say that we should exalt the jologs and whatever qualities we associate with them. The cultural gap is vast and I’d be lying if I said I could hang out with anyone who watches Eat Bulaga. We can’t homogenize taste or outlaw snobbery. However, we can equalize rights and cultivate attitudes around equality so that when it comes to matters like the law and access to education, it shouldn’t matter whether one is jologs or conyo or something in between.

On the way there, we ought to probe our own biases. Are we ready to forego the airs, privileges and deference we get because we have a bit more money and education than the rest of our countrymen? Class-based advantages are the first things to go as a society becomes more equitable. Can we swallow that? If the answer is no, then we’re not ready for democracy.

As for the OFWs, I’m not too worried about them. They’re industrious, they’re tough, they’re becoming more assertive. They don’t need us patronizing them with that bagong bayani crap. What they need is the protection of the law, a functioning government and a better economy so that those who wish to return home can. Nothing extra, really. Just the entitlements of all law-abiding, tax-paying, passport-carrying Filipinos. In the end we’re all Pinoys working hard for a better life. Let’s not be Malu Fernandez to each other.

taken from: http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/storypage.aspx?StoryId=90896