Many know this scene only too well, especially during this shoppingest time of year: At the supermarket checkout lane, with a large sign indicating it was an express counter, meaning exclusively for purchases of up to only 10 items, there comes that deliberately oblivious kitchen prima donna, or self-entitled S.O.B., who persists in going over the limit. It’s not for lack of math skills, but another humdrum manifestation of our culture of pwede na iyan — game the system, and get away with it because you can.
In this instance, it was a pair of S.O.B.s: a shaggy, gray-haired dotard, with his squat, pot-bellied younger brother. I pointed out what the sign said. Their full basket was clearly over the limit.
Pot Belly jabbed his dirty finger at me, as he spewed obscenities while his brother nodded encouragingly. He accused me of being ma-arte kasi nakapunta nang minsan sa America (inordinately fussy just because she’s been to the States), as if following the rules was something that one only did in the West.
This was the Philippines, where they both clearly believed rules didn’t apply — at least not to them. Perversely, Pot Belly claimed my insistence on rules was “screwing it up for everyone else.” Being law-abiding disrupted their preferred version of the Philippine social order, where laws were essentially meaningless.
In affirmation, the female cashier mournfully noted that the 10-item limit rule was flexible — infinitely so, to judge from these sleazebags’ two large full grocery bags.
I asked for security. The male bagger was infinitely slow to move to call for any. When a guard finally lumbered over, he wearily intoned that I should just be patient and let it go.
I pointed out that I had been unjustly assaulted, and gravely disrespected in public, to no avail. I then asked to speak with the manager.
I was following their establishment’s rules with my seven items, and demanded that he get Pot Belly to apologize. By then the two smirking S.O.B.s had moved to the package counter.
The manager went up to them, then promptly returned to me, declaring that since we were both customers, he was powerless to intervene. No, he didn’t bother to get these two S.O.B.s’ names.
I had done nothing to merit their vicious attack, but in this mediocre corporate drone’s eyes, we were equal — or rather as ostensibly upper-class males, they were even more so than me.
This express lane incident was a microcosm of our society. Just as a fish rots from the head, putrefaction comes from the top, as personified by the two S.O.B.s, but is propped up by the complicit bottom.
The toxic thread of failed masculinity ran from the initially unresponsive busboy, the reluctant security guard and the milquetoast of a manager to the sordid alpha dominance of the two entitled S.O.B.s, throwing their weight around because they could get away with it.
Interestingly, I later learned that the president and CEO of the corporation which ran the supermarket where I was so viciously attacked is a woman, a taipan’s daughter.
Would even a smidgen of this heiress’ rare female empowerment, male-derived though it may be, ever touch the thousands of lesser females she employed?
Between her and the poor little cashier who had been bullied into waiving the rules was an immeasurable distance, like reaching for the stars. We can only dream.
* * *
Carmen Aquino Sarmiento is an award-winning writer and a social concerns advocate.