The haves and have-nots
The down-to-earth Sancho Panza, in a conversation with the idealistic Don Quixote, once said, “Dos linajes solos hay en el mundo, decía una agüela mía, que son el tener y el no tener…” (As a grandmother of mine used to say, there are only two families in the world, the haves and the have-nots…)
So it was in the 17th-century world of Don Quixote, so it was thousands of years before him, and so it is still now all over the world of an estimated 7 billion people. The world is divided between the few rich or haves and the overwhelming majority of the poor or have-nots.
The poor have until now been resigned to their miserable fate, working, existing without complaint, and erupting only with sporadic actions, rallies and protests from time to time. But now they are becoming more active, and rallies against the scandalously rich, those who have seen fit not to moderate their corporate greed, are now sweeping the world.
The protests were inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States and the Indignance in Spain and have swept 951 cities in more that 80 countries around the world. Rallies, protests, marches, demonstrations roiled large cities as the frustrated and suffering poor slammed the huge corporations and the rich for perpetuating a “rotten [financial] system’’ that is widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots and bringing nothing but hopelessness, misery and, in some cases, physical and spiritual death to the poor.
The demonstrations have spread to the Philippines where activists last Saturday began a protest against hunger and joblessness. Expect the protests to grow larger as the days lengthen into weeks and the weeks into months. For many, many years now, we have been talking about a social volcano that is about to erupt. Unless something radical is done, and done fast, to relieve the plight of the poor, the social volcano may finally erupt, not only in the Philippines, but throughout the world, and engulf it in a terrible cataclysm.
Guns, guns, guns
It has been said by pro-gun people that it is not guns that kill; it is people. But more accurately, it is people with guns who kill. It is people with guns who kill more abstractedly, with less compunction, because in many cases, they do not have to come face to face with their victims.
In the past two weeks, we have seen the terrible toll that guns have exacted on people, some of them still young and full of promise. Even a seemingly jaded society was shocked by the killing of a teenager by another teenager, who later committed suicide, in a mall. The weapon: a homemade gun. A 26-year-old woman was held up, raped and killed by two men in front of a robbery victim in a grassy lot in UP Diliman, Quezon City. The weapon used by the killer-robbers to assert control over the victims: a gun. A sales supervisor was killed by two assailants inside his sports utility vehicle in Cubao, Quezon City. The weapon used: a 9mm pistol.
The situation is getting worse, aggravated apparently by the presence of so many guns at home, in government offices, in public places, even in the vehicles of high government officials. The situation has gone so bad that even the Philippine National Police is proposing a permanent gun ban. As proposed by Gunless Society proponent Nandy Pacheco, only government law enforcement agents in uniform, and on duty, would be allowed to carry guns outside their homes and offices. Others who carry guns would be subject to arrest if it is found out that they are carrying guns without permits to carry and without the proper exemptions.
We have done this before during the Comelec gun ban before each election, with some success. Why can’t we do this on a permanent basis?
London bobbies (policemen) are prohibited from carrying guns, except in special cases, and look how peaceful that big city is. Countries that have strict gun control laws like Japan, Australia and Sweden have low crime rates, and especially low homicide rates.
The rising tide of violence and killings should prod both the Executive and Legislative branches immediately to do something about the proliferation of guns.
