Occupy today’s pre-occupied Christmas

Christmas should be the biggest Occupy moment in the calendar, the original call for universal altruism, the disavowal of greed, the affirmation of our common humanity. Peace on earth. Goodwill to all. Shouldn’t the spirit of the Occupy movement descend upon Christmas as well? In Manila? I seriously doubt it.

During the Christmas Masses, we exalt Jesus’ birth in a manger, but before and after (godsakes, even during) Mass, we really prefer perfumed air. In fact, I’ve come across rich people’s interviews where they speak of favorite scents with names so exclusive I’d never heard of them before. Makes one feel baduy for ambitioning for merely a Christian Dior or Chanel No. 5.

“We are the 99 percent,” cry the Occupy protesters. In Manila, the goal is to escape the 99 percent. Much too much like the manger, come to think of it. Who wants to join Jesus there? In fact, if there’s any number that’s at the heart of Christmas celebrations, it is the 13th month pay or its equivalent for those too rich to be locked into fixed salaries.

“Democratic awakening”? Again, I’m not so sure. The Occupiers speak of political democracy only in relation to economic democracy, of how the elite 1 percent rig the rules to protect themselves and their wealth. Apparently only the traditional leftists remember the operative version of the golden rule: He who has the gold, makes the rules.

In our country, the real democratizing factor has been OFW remittances and call-center earnings. The site of their Occupy Wall Street—that is to say, the places where they show their power—is the shopping mall. For sure they express their newfound power as well each time their children enroll in school. Or each time a family member goes to a doctor for a check-up. But those are private moments. The new public square, so to speak, is the shopping mall, and the OFW and BPO breadwinner speak their voice at the cashier’s counter. Therein we find the true democratic awakening.

It actually presents a dilemma for the traditional call, mine included, to take consumerism away from Christmas. If the nascent Pinoy middle-class is just coming into its own, it will inevitably express itself in the one medium from which it had been excluded, and in which it cannot be excluded by the 1 percent who comprise the elite. Believe it or not, that medium is shopping.

But combine that still with yet another development: cheap Chinese knock-offs, the increasingly sophisticated supply of imitation goods drawn from a seemingly bottomless well. I find it increasingly hard to describe to young people how it was during the old days, when one had to drive to Dau in Pampanga, or anywhere outside an American military base, just to buy good quality imported goods. Those bases are gone today, thanks to the nationalists. The protectionist walls against imports have fallen, no thanks to the nationalists. And to befuddle the ideologues further, the heirs to Chairman Mao produce quality goods, hitherto unaffordable to the middle class. Finally, they can have a taste of what until then they saw only in glossy magazine ads. Nothing like those former Marxists to convert all of us into capitalist roaders.

This is just about the worst time for the anti-consumerist crusade, and what a combination. Newfound cash, and a steady supply of cheap goods to buy. How do you Occupy SM? Wouldn’t that be the antithesis of the Occupy movement? To suppress the honest dreams of the hard-working working class? To let them enjoy the honest fruits of an honest day’s labors? And strangely, to fulfill rather than frustrate Wall Street?

Finally, Occupy as a grassroots movement? Historically in our country, the most effective mass protests have been peopled by the urban middle class. Lower class protesters are suspect as rallyists-for-hire, the “hakot” crowd paid a fixed fee plus free lunch to man the barricades. The two Edsa uprisings have been largely an affair of the educated classes, and it is best recognized in contrast to Edsa III, the pro-Erap march from the Edsa Shrine to Malacañang in May 2001, which erupted in violence. Politically I doubt if we’re ready for an authentic Occupy movement, and will have to be satisfied either with its orchestrated versions deliberately staged for mass media, or with lesser, quieter actions (“social entrepreneurship,” I think it’s called), not always that rooted among the poor but certainly committed to linking arms with them.

Seen in this light, those priestly sermons seeking to restrain Christmas spending by the new middle class suddenly seem callously out of sync with their newest, most honest ways to express the self-giving that the season celebrates. The market, it turns out, ain’t really evil, and the goal is not to shut it out but to participate in it on fair and equal terms.

I struggle to imagine ways to restore the Occupy spirit to Manila’s Christmas of 2011. It is pre-occupied, literally and figuratively, by the traffic, the chaos, and the frenzy. The only true moments of reflection should be the traditional Christmas Masses, and even then I find it difficult to silence the heart and pray. Increasingly, it seems that people have resigned themselves to the rush of excitement at Christmas, and have shifted the quiet time to the period between Christmas and New Year. And in a supreme twist, since the exodus for foreign and local travel shifts to high gear then, the quietest place is home. Ah, the strange ways by which Providence talks to us, and leads us where we ought to have gone in the first place. “The end to all our exploring is to arrive where we started, and to know the place for the first time.” All the best for the season to one and all.

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