‘Due to the red-tagging of community pantries, public attention has been focused anew on the widespread poverty deepened by the current pandemic.’
SEN. Ping Lacson may turn out to be a formidable presidential candidate along with Vice President Leni Robredo and Sen. Manny Pacquiao. His consistent and nearly solitary battles against pork barrel had made him a standout in the legislature and in the battle against corruption. The dismaying COVID response has reopened our eyes to the rampant theft of public funds that should otherwise be realigned for thousands of the sick and suffering.
At almost every turn, Lacson had zealously objected to government malfeasance and wrongdoing. He has alerted the military to wake up against any “idiotic doctrinal imposition on the noble men of arms” in the wake of the resign-Duterte movement and pantry red-tagging.
Due to the red-tagging of community pantries, public attention has been focused anew on the widespread poverty deepened by the current pandemic. Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez, founder of Liberation Theology, says “material poverty is never good but an evil to be opposed.
When government fails to provide for anti-poverty programs, then it becomes incumbent upon citizens to oppose the situation, oppose the government’s failure to provide for its people, with liberty to come up with their own creative solutions as the heroic Patricia Non has done.
Former Justice undersecretary Eric Mallonga, an advocate for the uplift of indigents and the infirmed, points out that people should not look at poverty as “simply an occasion for charity but a degrading force that denigrates human dignity and ought to be opposed and rejected.” He is hopeful that “it can be eradicated with such simple solutions as community pantries for the hungry or community mass testing for the sick and elderly.
Fr. Gutierrez stresses “poverty is not a result of fate or laziness, it is due to structural injustices that benefit some while marginalizing others; structural injustices that allow just one dozen billionaire oligarchs to flourish in a country where 85 million people are either hungry, homeless, and medically hopeless without any physical means for physical recovery. Thus, he encourages: “Poverty is not evitable, collectively the poor can organize and facilitate social change.”
Fr. Gutierrez stresses that “poverty is a complex reality and is not limited to its economic dimension. To be poor is to be insignificant.” And in EJKs that targeted mostly the helpless poor, “poverty means an early and unjust death.” It was why Mahatma Gandhi declared “poverty as the greatest form of violence.”
Mallonga exhorts that all should be hugely burdened that “poverty is a subhuman condition in which the majority of humanity lives today and continues to pose a major challenge to every Christian conscience.” But that conscience only thrives with the “heart of stone.”
