COLUMN | AS THE BAMBOOS SWAY
On April 14, Ana Patricia Non, set up a wooden cart filled with food stuff at a street corner within a university village in Manila. She wanted to share close to a thousand worth of goods with her neighbors at Maginhawa community. She called it a pantry with a simple call of getting only what you need and giving only what you can afford.
What she did not expect was, in barely a week, pantries were mushrooming all over Manila and the country. Kind-hearted individuals voluntarily donated goods according to their capability; and those in need were only getting what they needed at the sprouting pantries.
The pantries are a response of the people to the Philippine government’s lack of ‘ayuda’ or help to the thousands of Filipinos who have gone hungry due to massive unemployment amidst the Covid-19 crisis which, to date, have not found a platform towards being flattened; in fact, still worsening.
While Ana Patricia Non is being praised for what she initiated, she has a problem. She is a product of the University of the Philippines which is tagged by the Philippine Government as a hotbed of communist organizers. Fearing for her life, Non had to cease her pantry operations for at least a day, goaded only to continue upon the insistence of the growing popularity of the pantries.
But the tagging, harassment, and surveillance of the pantries as communist continue. Military threatened “to disrupt a citizen initiative to set up makeshift food donation stalls meant to soften the economic blow of lockdown measures as the Philippines grapples with a new surge in coronavirus infections.”
Duterte’s anti-communist task spokesman Lt General Antonio Parlade even went biblical. He compared Non to the devil. “Satan gave an apple to Eve, it all started from there,” he said.
He is forgetting or does not know that the pantries are an expression of the biblical Mark 12:30-31 which says “Love the Lord your God with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.”
If Catholics venerate the saints, why would they not listen to St. Augustine who said, “Call nothing your own, but let everything be yours in common.” Translated into Latin which was the language of Catholic priests used just a few ages ago, St. Augustine’s words goes, “Et non dicatis aliquid proprium sed sint vobis omnia communia.”
Again, on the bible, at Acts 4:32, it says “Things were common among them.” In Latin, this says, “Errant ellis omina communia.”
Was Jesus Christ a communist because he wore the same sandals as the poor fishermen and ate the same enliven bread as the people of his time who were persecuted by the Roman Empire? Was Jesus Christ a communist because He was in communis with the people and shared seven loaves of bread and fish to a multitude?
Would these not mean that when the military tags the pantry movers to be communists, expressing their love for their neighbors, that the military is actually tagging Jesus Christ, the apostles, the saints as communists? Is the bible itself communist?
I believe what scared Lt General Antonio Parlade is the communist phrase popularized by Karl Marx which says, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” which is parallel to the pantries’ call, “Give only what you can afford, get only what you need.”
Thus, the red tagging – even if the call is only to share with your neighbors which the government is lacking in action to do so.
Nonetheless, government officials, unable to ward off from the backlash of the tagging, had to concede and downplayed Parlade and asked him to pipe down. They instead praised those have more pantries being set up – hoping they would die down soon.
The military also instead set up their copycat ‘Barangayanihan’ distributing goods at centers decided by them – with one caveat – those who are being benefitted must take pictures of themselves to post on their Facebook pages.
The response of the people? Thank you “pero kung hindi pa nagkaroon ng pantries, hindi pa magkakaroon ng ‘Barangayanihan.’
Ironic, too, is that they serve ‘lugaw’ at the military outposts. Vice-President Leni Robredo has started the ‘lugaw’ concept ages ago for which she was trolled by government agents over a million one times.
Bottom line: People will find ways to help each other when a government fails to respond to their needs. # nordis.net
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