Ugly

(You may want to finish whatever it is you’re doing first. Have your meal and get hydrated. Check your chats and respond to those that matter. Then, proceed to a cozy corner of your room. You can doomscroll later after this. But for now, sit back, breathe in, breathe out, clear your mind, this is going to be a bit long and ugly.)

One way or another, I’m sure we all lost part of our humanity somewhere in EDSA.

In my case, I may have lost more than half of it on a December night back in 2012. Fresh from a heartbreak, I had to endure a two-hour bus ride from the Mall of Asia to Ortigas, standing—no, I don’t think I was even standing. It was the lateral compression of the door and the sweaty back of a huge man that was keeping me in a perfectly upright position—left cheek flat on the door.

Despite losing most of my soul, my body arrived intact and miraculously unscathed at Robinson’s Galleria. Even the towering bronze mother of Christ looked like she was only half-full of grace, disappointedly staring down at the endless snake of vehicles around her feet. I lit a cigarette and found a spot near the church. Just a stick, I thought, so I can let off steam and blow the memories of that girl away in bitter fumes.

The plan was to endure another hellish bus ride to the east. But even the dying G-Liner buses were full to the brim and no longer welcomed passengers. I had been working for a year at that time, and I had spare cash. I thought I could hail a cab and just give the driver an additional hundred to make up for the leg-numbing traffic he would have to endure along Ortigas Extension. Good plan, eh?

An hour and about thirteen cabs later, I was still there, along with a bunch of equally pissed off people. All the cabbies I hailed rolled down their windows and asked where I was heading. The moment I told them my destination, they would make up silly excuses. I empathized with the first three cabbies, but my patience started to wear thin by the fourth. I just needed to get home, take a nice cold bath, and sleep in peace.

I hailed another cabbie. As the taxi approached, my phone kept ringing. It was her. She was already home in Cavite, and I was still on the road. Didn’t she just send me home because she preferred her “guy friend” to take her home? I was so confused—and mad, and sad, and tired, and hungry, and pissed, and so many other things. I’m not about to answer the call and explode in profanities—the remaining humanity in me at work.

When the taxi stopped, I immediately opened the front door. For a minute, I thought the bearded cabbie was Jesus. He turned out to be a plainclothes Satan when he turned me down with a goddamn attitude. My whole day flashed in front of me—her face, the guy friend’s face, the bus and its door, my trash-talking editor at work, her again happy with the guy friend going home to Cavite. I wanted to destroy the world. I went nuclear.

I couldn’t remember the exact expletives I yelled at the driver. What I remember was refusing to close the door and asking the cabbie to come down and fight. He kept trying to close the door, but I held it firmly while berating him with all the words that would get me cancelled today. He finally won, closed the door, pressed on the pedal, and sped away, nearly dragging me with him. I let go of the door—I had to.

I stepped back to the gutter, breathed in and out, and looked around to see the horrified faces of people. Luckily, not everyone had a good phone camera at the time, or I would have ended up like the viral “Amalayer” video. I felt more relieved than embarrassed. My phone kept ringing. I switched it off and cooled down for a minute. Acceptance is key. I had no choice but to walk for an hour and a half.

I have never used Grab's Quiet Ride feature—and I don’t intend to ever. It’s a choice.

I'd rather give a chatty driver an open ear. I mean, I could use a friend to make this soul-crushing traffic a bit more bearable anyway. I do the same for chatty motorcycle taxi riders, though it’s a bit more difficult to hear them sometimes because their words tend to get drowned out by the wind. Nonetheless, it’s always nice to have a conversation with people from different worlds.

Grab itself, or any other ride-hailing service for that matter, is also a choice that I lean into these days. It’s the convenience, right? It’s faster than, say, taking a chance on cramped jeepneys during the rush hour. A motorcycle taxi can snake through the crevices of the frozen highway and get you to the office on time. An air-conditioned Grab ride can keep you from turning into another urban ghoul, insulating you from the dehumanizing Manila weather.

Travel time remains pretty much the same, but these privatized commutes hide you, one way or another, from the true face of the city—safe from the mindless stampede of sweaty men, the guilt-tripping stares of red-eyed rugby boys, the intrusive voice of pushy bible preachers, the threat of pocket-slashing thieves, the paralyzing disgust of seeing publicly masturbating fat men, and the potent concoction of the sweat and grime of an enslaved working class.

Paul, the rider I booked a week ago from the condo, shared some of his commute horror stories during our relatively short ride to my office. Before he got the chance to loan a motorcycle, he was also one of those workers traveling 30 kilometers from Pasay to Fairview for a minimum-wage contract job. In 2013, the bus he rode at dawn figured in a multi-vehicle collision. Thankfully, he only got scratches. But there were a couple of deaths in the other vehicles.

“I don’t think we’ll ever get to own a condo unit, let alone a home,” he told me in Filipino. Even the money he earns from the motorcycle taxi business isn’t enough to cover their daily needs. At times, Paul’s wife would ask if he could take home a proper fried chicken for dinner, but he had no choice but to get that same bland chicken from the sidewalk stall—even after 10 hours of work on the road. “My wife loves Jollibee’s chicken. But we rarely get it.”

I swam in drowning work that day. Later that evening, my dinner of choice was Jollibee’s chicken spaghetti meal. I was about to take my first bite when I remembered Paul. Earlier, I asked him what he feels about the corruption scandals we hear about in the news. He sighed in resignation and said, “It's just a gut punch when you see their money and compare it to yours. But what can you do? Kill them all? That’s impossible.”

Robert had a plan, but he soon found out that it wasn’t as stable as he hoped.

He was the Grab driver I had booked to take me home. Like Paul and I, he too had to endure the hell of public transport for years. But he got lucky when he landed a job in Hong Kong as a personal driver. “It was literally like a lottery. I applied at every recruitment agency for years before I got the call,” he told me with a sense of relief as the vehicle dragged us through the Ortigas Extension jam.

He was a real chatterbox, and I liked it. “I had a clear plan in mind when I got there, sir. We loaned a substantial amount of money just so I could work abroad, and I intended to repay them quickly so I could start saving for myself.” His plan was to work without any days off. He couldn’t pull it off in the first two years, as he navigated a different world. But the next two years, he did exactly just that—730 days of non-stop work, rain or shine, in sickness or in health.

“My Filipino colleagues thought I was joking. But I showed them. While they were buying new clothes or gadgets every salary, I was keeping my hard-earned pay intact. I send enough for my family, and I save everything else. I never bought anything that I didn’t need,” he told me with so much pride and passion. “Even my boss took pity on me and gave me extra cash to buy a new pair of shoes. I did—just because she pushed. But I bought the cheapest ones.”

After two years of working, Robert finally got enough money to buy his own car. “That was the plan—buy one car in cash and use it for business.” And that’s how he got into Grab. He’s also a rent-a-car service provider when there are available clients. Ironically, he found himself still doing nearly non-stop work just to earn enough. But at least he’s with his family. “Four more years, sir, and my last son will finish college. That will be a huge relief.”

I didn’t bring it up, but he started the conversation about the corrupt politicians we hear about in the news. “You know what, sir. Maybe the only way we get out of this mess is by killing and burning all these corrupt politicians,” he said jokingly. “If they weren’t stealing our money, I would’ve had the cash to invest in other sorts of business.” The dream, he said, is to buy a minibus and lease it to a BPO company that needs a service for its employees.

Robert is still optimistic about his dreams, but he knows that it might take another stroke of luck to turn them into reality. “To be frank, sir, all those rallies a week ago? I don’t think they will change anything. We’ve seen this before—scandals, witnesses, hearings, leadership changes, and we’ll come back here to where we are in a full circle.” He believes this is our fate—no use dreaming of alternate universes. We just accept this one and try to stay alive.

In an alternate universe, I wrote greeting card verses instead of routine crime reports.

Kind of like that Joseph Gordon-Levitt character, but without the manic-pixie-dream-girl part. Instead of chasing trails of paper, red herrings, and warm corpses on the streets, I would’ve spent hours in my seat, chasing words in books and magazines, trying to look for new meanings down to the last morpheme.

Shit, I would have pioneered the Lang Leav way of cutting run-ons into shorter run-ons as a way of thinking out loud and probably infused some pretentious Bukowski garbage to inspire a whole generation of red-baiting Ben&Ben fans. I would’ve sold books that became movies. I would’ve lived a relatively calm life, seeing the beauty in sorrow and the sorrow in beauty, in my metaphorical bubble of metaphors, unmindful of an invisible world of inhuman designs.

But as fate would have it, I’d ditch the interview with Hallmark Philippines to attend my college graduation—a decision that ultimately brought me to this universe, where, sometime in late 2016, as a young reporter, I’d join a huddle of more experienced photojournalists beside a crime scene during a lull in between shootouts in the rotting underbelly of Manila. I lit a stick and listened to veterans.

“Look at those kids,” one of them thought out loud, pointing to the children, easily between seven and ten, roaming around the police line, trying to peek at the bullet-holed body. It was late at night, and President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war was raging on the streets, unseen by people in proper houses, gated villages, and condominium units. “Think about it. Down the road, we'll be looking at a generation of severely scarred people. It will be a very angry generation.”

Nearly a decade later, I was back in Manila, not as a reporter but as one of the angry folks rallying for change amid a massive corruption scandal. And what do I see? Kids, teenagers, and young adults—dirty little urchins from Manila’s underbelly, throwing rocks and bottles at the police, kicking the barricades, cursing at the state forces, bombing them with water cannon and canister upon canister of teargas.

Instincts brought me to the middle of the fray in Mendiola. I filmed what I could. Then the police unleashed a river of anti-riot cops. Full battle gear. They were chasing the kids in black shirts, the ones with the Straw Hat Pirates flag. I ran back to the café, back to my friends, but I kept filming. The cops were right there. Arm's length away. They arrested a bystander. Just like that. I lost my courage. I went inside and hid like a baby.

It took us more than an hour to escape the chaos. Back home, watching the news, I saw the extent of the riots. It was these thin-framed youngsters who looked and moved like gang members—no shield nor armor, just makeshift masks and tattered clothes, sticks and stones, butane lighters and small firecrackers, and some huge balls—balls I may have lost to a middle-class adulthood.

It was them, I thought, albeit belatedly. The children of the drug war are here. These were the angry children they all warned us about. And they’re bringing with them a merciless wrath that they nurtured so well in their muted existence, away from everyone’s concern. It was raw and unadulterated rage coming out of a bloody cocoon, down in the reeking dregs of this godforsaken city.

Blood spilled that evening in the hallowed protest grounds of Mendiola.

Two people were killed, while 216 were arbitrarily arrested, including nearly a hundred minors and several bystanders. One of the fatalities was a 15-year-old boy. He was trying to move his motorcycle away from the fray near the SOGO hotel in Recto when a 52-year-old watch repairman, confused by the commotion, stabbed him with a knife. The other fatality was Eric Saber.

We’re the same age, Eric and I. But unlike me, who lives in a condo and takes Grab rides to work, Eric was a low-wage construction worker. He was heading home, deep in that commuting nightmare I know so well, and got stranded in Recto as police clashed with young protesters. He was a bystander right across SOGO hotel when SWAT members brought out their long rifles. Then, everyone there heard gunshots.

“He was about to cross the street to take a look when there were successive gunshots – more than four. That’s when he fell,” Bryan (not his real name) told Altermidya. “I ran to him alone to check. I saw he had a bullet wound in the neck. I immediately stood up to look for help or a medic, but I found none.” Eric, who originally hails from Bicol, was declared dead on arrival at a hospital just 10 minutes away from the fray.

I couldn’t focus on work that week. All those unruly kids, the blood, the brutality—the true face of the city somehow eluded me for quite a while, particularly after I left news. Absorbed in my own struggles, I had almost forgotten that from the comfort of my middle-class life, there was this invisible world of people dehumanized, not just by those spirit-breaking bus rides, but by the whole damn system itself.

Years of working in news gave me a rare privilege: the chance to safely navigate the nameless alleys behind roadside establishments, places most people avoid out of fear or disgust. It didn’t matter if it was in Manila, Novaliches, Caloocan, Bulacan, Cavite, Tacloban, or Cotabato—this bigger, more intricate universe, unseen by those who have the choice to unsee, was all connected by one thing—desperation.

Here is a universe where Jollibee is their Wolfgang Steakhouse.

Here is a universe where P500 a day is a lucky day and P1,000 a day is a miracle, a universe where it’s more practical to just go to the funeral parlor than to a hospital, a universe where meth brings more hope than God, a universe where hunger is the standard and a full-day’s meal is a blessing, a universe where it’s more logical to rob or kill to survive than to be kind and die in the gutter.

It's an ugly world where people, rats, and roaches have learned to coexist in peace. It’s a place where most of your kwek-kwek vendors, bank security guards, manong drivers, construction workers, parking boys, manicuristas and pedicuristas, janitors, and delivery riders come from—and these people are to them what the shoe game-flaunting, piso-fare traveling, iPhone-flexing, milk-tea slurping, Samgyup-hunting corporate workers are to us in this middle-class world.

We call them names—squammy, jeje, badjao. We dismiss them as economic non-factors, taxpayer liabilities, agents of chaos, and more. We try so hard to separate ourselves from them, in fear or disgust—or in a blatant display of superiority complex. We cry over corruption like it just killed us when it has already killed them—many fucking times over. We tend to think of our nation’s misery as equal—but no, even hell has deeper circles.

Think about it. When typhoons come, it’s them in their makeshift houses who face the wrathful winds, not us in concrete walls. When the flood rises, it’s them in the low-lying areas that drown first, not us in mighty buildings and gated subdivisions. When fire rages in the summer heat, it doesn’t just raze a single house—it’s a whole community that suffers. When Duterte’s drug war came, they saw more blood than we’ll probably ever see in our lives.

Imagine the anger you nurture in this kind of existence—this would dwarf even the worst episode of rage I ever had. That’s why it sounded so funny to me when people in our world would admonish these rioters in Mendiola for throwing rocks and pesky little weasel bombs, flashing middle fingers and yelling profanities in front of the press, breaking glasses, breaching steel barricades, and burning police bikes.

I really wish they didn’t do all those things, but these people, if you look at it, violence is the only language they know. If we have the space and time to wait for this corruption mess to be resolved, they don’t. For them, it’s a matter of life and death—always has been.

Perhaps, they thought that we in the upper world felt their anger, that they willingly joined us in the march to Mendiola, even if they didn’t understand most of our chants. They felt one with us. And I was there, literally by their side. While we were yelling, “Down with imperialism,” and “Jail the corrupt,” they were shouting through a makeshift megaphone, “Die, all you motherfucking Discayas, die!”

Perhaps it is we who failed to understand that rage, kept inside throughout those decades of abuse and hopelessness, is meant to be ugly.

My social media feed was a flood of rage against the young, rowdy protesters.

A group of retired journalists, particularly from an outfit where I came from, uploaded a podcast episode in the aftermath of Mendiola. They were angry at the kids who brought chaos to the protest. They even just lazily bought the narrative of a political dynasty seated as Justice Department head, that the kids were paid to riot. The idea is even funnier when you think that these gangsters can just take home the money and avoid getting arrested by cops.

“It’s not true that the Mendiola protest solely represents the masses. The EDSA rally was also a mass movement. Those who joined were also the ones I saw in the MRT trains, commuting like most folks,” another one said, referring to the peaceful afternoon rally where celebrities and even politicians joined.

“Some people were trying to make this a class issue. That these people rallying in Mendiola had legitimate concerns—that they were the ones who were not given the shot at a better life—that it’s not like the people who discuss the country’s issues in posh dining tables and villages. This is not just their problem. It’s everyone’s problem!” another one pointed out with so much vitriol.

To an extent, I agree. The masses are not just us who can articulate rage in coherent sentences. It’s us and them—more importantly, them. I mean, these people we’re talking about, paid at or below minimum, represent at least 65 million of the total population in 2021, while we in the middle class are around 44 million. And it’s not to divide us, but to really drive the point that it’s us—a hundred million people strong versus the 1% hoarding our wealth.

But these former newsroom heads believed that those kids didn’t represent our anger against corruption. I don’t know how accurate that is, but if you, my friend, had the chance to imagine a world where you could freely, without real-life consequences, express your anger against these corrupt politicians, how would you do it? Just the usual march and yell? Probably sing some Ben&Ben song along the way? Honestly, what does your anger look like?

Again, I don’t really approve of riots and violent expressions—not normally that is. But I thought that, if any, what the kids did was to show us that we ought to be angrier. If they are willing to get arrested, beaten, or even killed just to express their anger, shouldn’t we as well? Maybe, we’re just too proud to learn from the unlearned.

I couldn’t put it much better than the kids themselves. Tattered shirts and all, one of them told a journalist: “Kami lubog na lubog sa baha, sila nasa mataas. Paano naman kaming nasa baba? Kahit silipin nila kami 'te, hindi nila kami matatanaw kasi sobrang taas nila.” (We are always struggling with floods, while they're safe in a high place. What about us down here? Even if they tried to peek, they won't be able to see us because their way up high!)

There was a historian who posed a question: Does the archipelagic nature of our nation, with all its waterways in between, make it difficult for us to become a united people? On the surface, it appears to be yes. But he said that when we look back at our pre-colonial ancestors, it’s actually the waters that connected our people—it was the network—the ancient internet, if you will—that allowed us to share cultures, trade, and mingle—that united us.

Perhaps this is how we must see these floods born from corruption. They are a call to us—who live as individual islands of struggle, dreams, and failure—to awaken our ancestral spirit of solidarity. They are a reminder that we are not each other's enemies. We, the people, have only one enemy. They sit atop an age-old pyramid, hoarding our collective wealth. May this flood carry us to their gates, so we may finally drown the root of all our problems.