The crisis is worse, but for the moment
most of us are calming down a bit

October 22, the first men’s shopping day under the renewed coronavirus restrictions. This reporter has to get to Western Union as a somewhat urgent matter of whether the dogs and cats will be fed over the next few days.

(Dogs will eat almost anything, so yucca could be dug up, but with cats, that’s another story. It’s a classic calculation, as the most ancient of Prime Directives, even older than the Bible, is written on the walls of Egyptian tombs: “FEED THE CAT!”)

Anyway, the calculation was that Western Union at the Machetazo in Penonome opens at 7 a.m., so I’d have to be there early. I stepped off the bus at the stop across the street and my dumb phone said 7:04. The lady at the Western Union booth said that they had run out of cash the day before and she didn’t know if any would arrive on this day.

SO, a shift of plans and calculations on the fly. The place at Mailboxes Etc., across from Super 99, opens at 8. Conserving resources, exercising these buzzardly old bones, the better choice – saving a $1.50 cab fare – would be to get off the bus at the hospital stop, climb up and down the stairs on the walkway over the Pan-American Highway, then take a lazy stroll the rest of the way.

Lo and behold – a spectacle and chance to kill some time! The brothers of SUNTRACS were blocking the road in front of the prosecutors’ office! It was part of a national “picket” to register annoyance with the government’s latest labor decrees in particular and its handling of the economy of a country with a great many working people and business owners shut out of work in the face of an epidemic.

The man with the microphone started off talking about the day’s special grievances, then soon came to the usual slogans – “Without struggle, there are no victories!” and so on. That can get boring, and meanwhile the prosecutors and cops outside of the Public Ministry’s building were part of the audience. ESPECIALLY when a bunch of them are carrying guns, you don’t want to leave such folks, bewildered, excited or perhaps worst of all, bored, so the speaker addressed them: “They’ll call on you to suppress our people’s movements, but you can’t even suppress the crooks in your own buildings!” This reporter can’t read minds, but DID notice some smiles and chuckles at that line. These didn’t appear to be expressions of scornful dismissal of the ridiculous.

Got to Mailboxes a bit before eight, and when they opened their doors the lady told me that they were out of cash, too, but some might come in by noon. The guard at the door suggested the WU office at Mas Me Dan across the driveway, so I strolled over and got in line. After some waiting and uncertainty, SUCCESS! No mad political scientist experiments in trying to get cats to like yucca over THESE holidays.

Also had this weird old hippie to feed, and visits to both of the little Chinese grocery stores in the complex led to the awful discovery of NO MUSTARD GREENS. No bok choy, either. Other cruciferous veggies would have to do, so something that this reporter won’t usually do was done: I got in the line to enter Super 99. Sickly looking broccoli, no cauliflower but a reasonable selection of cabbages – at higher prices than before. No soy protein. Got one of their last five-pound bags of brown rice.

~ ~

Set aside the slogans. Do pay attention to the self-centered and extremist rants of business leaders, because they’re the only ones to whom this administration listens. And don’t entirely dismiss the rumors that Nito is too sick to be running things, such that we are now in effect a co-dictatorship of the bankers and their leader the vice president on the one hand and the party boss of the legislature’s PRD caucus on the other hand.

Look at THOSE scenes and you see some notorious situations that would make members of SUNTRACS and the National Police – both recruited from very similar social strata – agree about certain things.

The economy is bad and it will get worse. The ruling circles never learn.

In the year to come the protesters will be out, and so will the riot squads. It does make a lot of sense, however, that for the time being things calm down for a holiday truce of sorts. It’s a time that people in different social roles and political places other than on the gravy train can look for a bit of solidarity, understanding and love.

Times were also hard and the government legendarily obnoxious when Mary and Joseph’s family grew all those centuries ago. Perhaps, with all of our sundry misfortunes, this is a good time to get into the original sense of things.

Mrs. Besant. US Library of Congress photo.

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