Not very great

WHAT THE right hand giveth, the left hand taketh away.

A few days before he fought Shane Mosley, Manny Pacquiao appeared before the press in Las Vegas with a message. He was going to put on yellow gloves for the fight, he said, to show that he wasn’t just fighting Mosley, he was also fighting poverty. Yellow is of course President Benigno Aquino III’s special color, so Pacquiao’s subliminal pitch was that he was in fact joining government in fighting it.

I was elated and said after the fight that if he could only do to poverty what he did to Mosley, the poor would be saved in no time at all. I said Pacquiao had nothing left to prove, he had no worthy opponents left to fight, it was time he went on to fight the bigger fight, the nobler fight, the more transcendent fight. The way Muhammad Ali did well before he ran out of opponents in the ring. If Pacquiao took fighting poverty seriously, I said, he could wrest the title of The Greatest even from him.

Alas, I spoke too soon. A few days after he fought Shane Mosley, Manny Pacquiao appeared before his countrymen with a message. His next opponent was going to be—the RH bill. The Church forbade contraception, he said, and he would obey it. And he would encourage others to obey it. Proof of it was that he had already forbidden his wife from taking the pill after he learned she was on it.

RH was not the solution to poverty, he said. Proof of it was that he came from a big family, and look where he is now. May awa ang Diyos. God provides.

God help us.

Now I’m thankful Pacquiao’s fight with Mosley was not the classic one his previous fights—with Ricky Hatton, Miguel Cotto and Antonio Margarito—were. Had it been so, he might have gotten a lot more masa on his side fighting the RH bill. Just as well, I’m thankful Pacquiao’s forays into things other than boxing haven’t been all that successful. He endorsed Manny Villar during the last elections, and Villar lost. It does suggest that Filipinos, rich and poor, may have gotten a little more discriminating—or a lot more cynical—over the years they are now able to draw a clearer line between entertainment and real life.

I can only hope to God—yes him, or her— that the Filipino, rich or poor, can use the same discrimination, or cynicism, to see through Pacquiao’s argument, if he really means it. Of course he managed to pull through despite coming from a big and impoverished family. But how many people who come from big and impoverished families have the talent to see them through crushing adversity, not to speak of make them one of the richest men on earth?

In any case, his argument is double-edged, showing as it does precisely what it means to be poor and come from a big family. His chosen path to get out of the rut is boxing, which is one of the precious few things left to someone caught up in that plight. How many Pacquiaos can possibly emerge from it? Look at Rolando Navarrete who once rose to the top of the heap but has now been reduced to a pauper, begging for work and gratuity from those who still remember he was once great. And Navarrete was exceptional. Think of the thousands who, never having gone past elementary school, if at all they finished it, are reduced to having their brains battered for a crack at survival.

You look at Pacquiao, you’ll see Rocky and hear “Eye of the Tiger.” You look at pretty much everybody else and you’ll hear only Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer,” particularly the part that says: “In the clearing stands a boxer, and a fighter by his trade/ And he carries the reminders/ Of every glove that laid him down or cut him/ ’Till he cried out in his anger and his shame/ I am leaving, I am leaving, but the fighter still remains.”

RH, the antis keep saying, is not the solution to poverty. Of course not, as I said the last time. Not by itself. Neither is land reform, neither is fighting corruption, neither is graduating from college. Not by themselves. But taken together, they do push back poverty and misery immeasurably. Indeed, RH alone may not solve poverty, but the lack of it adds to poverty and misery all by itself. The absence of it deepens pain and suffering all by itself. The benighted opposition to it spreads benightedness and ignorance all by itself.

What is infuriating about all this is that the quality of life of the Filipino family should be decreed by a bunch of men who have no families, who have no understanding of family, who have never raised a son and daughter, never mind dozens of them, despite fathering not a few of them themselves. And who are not poor, even if some of them, like Pacquiao, came from the poor. They will never be poor again, other than in mind and spirit.

These are the people who can hear the non-existent wailing of non-existent “unborn children” but cannot hear the keening of the wife who has to endure the attentions of a husband demanding sex after coming home from a drunken spree, the screams of the woman at childbirth every year for as long as her body can bear the ravages of pregnancy throughout life (which is bound to be a short one), the sobs of despair from the mother who left his brood in the hovel they call home—what else could she do, she has a dozen mouths to feed—that burned to the ground while she sewed in a sweatshop, vended food, or washed clothes for the parish.

What the right hand giveth, the left hand taketh away. You can vow all you want to fight poverty, but you fight an effort to give parents a crack at having only as many kids as they can give a life or future to, you won’t beat poverty, you’ll just beat up the poor. Or you’re just going to rearrange their faces into that of Cotto and Margarito. That’s not great.

That sucks.