SAPped

Despair explodes on the early-evening newscast. Having queued for hours in the sun, the impoverished lurch to the end of the line to discover that they are not on the “master list” and therefore are ineligible for the “ayuda.” The camera pans through the ragged crowd caught in the throes of misery. They shout hoarsely through their face masks—to the bitter end mindful of complying with the requirement—wanting to know why, for the love of God, they cannot be given the promised money when they have filled out the SAP form and presented a proper ID. There is no coherent answer, whether from the harried (or officious) personnel dispensing the cash or from an indifferent universe.

The wrenching scene involving the government’s Social Amelioration Program for specific segments of the population is replicated in various other places, making it impossible for the wearied observer to look away. More often than not there is a dense crowd queuing (the obligatory physical distancing be damned), bearing sheets of paper, tattered umbrellas, and a surfeit of hope. And faces marked by a mask (rather like the yellow star that Jews were forced to wear in Nazi-occupied Europe), now the badge of distinction in this era of the pandemic.

Weeping with rage and shaking his SAP form, a man lunges at the camera, the better perhaps to present his position that he has been treated unjustly. (The shot, looped, plays over and over, so that his tiny female companion appears to be constantly holding him back.) Women worn down if not by age then by youth and multiple childbirths make shrill noises, except that, rendered inarticulate by the savagery of living on the knife edge, or by the fear of angering the gods that call the shots, they falter at precisely formulating their lot: an exclusion that amounts to a crime. Mothers seethe, their faces distorted by anger. Where are all those who come crowding our community during election time? one asks, sneering. Saan na kayo? Another, a single parent of three, wonders how else she could collect the children she left with her mother in Laguna before the quarantine came down, if the SAP is nowhere within her reach.

(The scenes beggar description. One merely, clumsily, attempts to grasp the edge of their powerlessness. “Prose should flow,” John Updike wrote, “the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling into your ear.”)

The sanctimonious who pontificate that poverty is “a choice” and that the poor deserve what they’re getting, those in whom this pandemic-induced lockdown has produced an excess of piety, may be unsettled by such lamentations—and then be moved to switch TV channels. After all, officials of the Department of the Interior and Local Government perkily claim 90-percent (or thereabouts) success in the distribution of SAP funds. Yet reports are rife with not unsurprising chicanery: local officials padding master lists with the names of ghosts as well as their near and dear, taking commissions from the distributed cash, or making off with the money altogether.

It is crucial that the supposed investigation and indictment of these hardened crooks holding titles proceed to the logical conclusion and not fade into thin air, in the manner of, for example, the issue involving the funds used for the 2019 Southeast Asian Games. The social volcano is loudly rumbling, no matter that those who do get blessed are shown on TV shedding tears of joy over crisp P1,000 bills and profusely thanking God and the President. Surely the authorities felt the rumbling, such as on Mother’s Day when SUVs and other vehicles bearing people maddened with cabin fever clogged the restaurant avenues to order food for feasting, while elsewhere, in the communities of despair, the daylong wait for the SAP “ayuda”—P3,500, P5,000, P8,000—who dictated the amount?—sapped the energy and spirit of the destitute and disempowered.

Imagine it. Before “Ambo” cooled the torrid temperature, many queued for the SAP even before daybreak; still others spent the night where they stood or sat the previous day, frightened of the prospect of losing their place and starting all over again from scratch—and maybe trying mightily to banish the thought that they will get not one red cent at the end of their wait. (Yet here is a scene from what seemed like another planet: When one day, weeks into the lockdown, Starbucks opened, the deluge of customers was so intense that it closed again the next day.)

Are the Palace’s “best and brightest” in on this? Are they seeing these SAP news clips depicting how things are going on the ground? They should be, if they are to be deemed fit for their posts and their pay, or if they are to understand the simmering outrage over, say, Police Maj. Gen. Debold Sinas’ birthday party—the shamelessness of it, the utter disregard for public opinion, the uselessness of an apology from an official blinded by power.

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