In J.D. Salinger’s book “Franny and Zooey”, the acerbic actor Zooey admonished his younger sister Franny who was on the brink of a nervous breakdown :

“What’s the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge? It all seemed like exactly the same thing to me, if you take off the wrapping---and it still does!”

Big words from a young man, especially when he followed it up with :

“I don’t think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while-just once in a while-there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn’t, it’s just a disgusting waste of time!”

When one feels cradling these words like one’s own, all the diversions present may seem meaningless. I quote these words to make clear where I am coming from when I switched on the television set one noontime. It has only two channels; one is government-owned.

The commercial channel glimmered first. This was around November of last year.

Immediately, I was presented with singing people. They were the faces I favorably wrote about in this blog not so long ago. Ordinary people, if you take that within the celebrity framework of the medium of television. They have not been salooned. They usually wore slippers and shorts. Some have lost their teeth; some their hair. Often, their bleakness was shielded from the spotlight.

I recognized the host. He bantered jokes with these common people. Tales and talks were exchanged. This reminded me of barbershop gossip of the folklore type. They spoke with hilarity. Their local fluency revealed the origins of their identities.

I found myself watching this show precisely because of that. How, as-a-matter-of-factly, the daily grinds of life became the sources of dialogue between the host and the game participants. The absence of glamour was striking since the show did not purport to be a magazine program but what may be slashly labeled as a variety-entertainment-game show.

You do not see big-named stars exposed lengthily. In their place were folks who must have passed by or had once lived in your houses : the laundrywoman, the plumber. There were also balikbayans who greet their families with contagious shrieks and grins. They were the ones who oftentimes provide instant financial assistance to the game participants. How a commercial presentation can package this as a truly authentic program without additional simulations for entertainment purposes, I leave that explanation to its creators. What I am interested about is that in such a short span of time that I had been watching this show, I never foresaw how it will stall one Saturday in utmost shock. It became a national headline because of a tragedy which left it open to issues of deeper probes. Poverty. Investigations. Culpabilities.

In the aftermath of this mishap, the ordinary people I saw on television who had willingly talked about their plight mostly with bravery, candor, hard-nosed wit and flair to entertain that I get astonished oftentimes, had unwittingly been incised to smaller proportions as either lazy or beggars. That they lack diligence. Some of them, by being there, were portrayed as greedy. That they trampled upon dead bodies still hoping to get the top prizes. Or are in constant crave for dole-outs.

I scanned the papers for other points of view. Obviously, most of the very insightful commentators focused on the larger deliberations of how shows like this promote mendicancy (a mendicant, according to the Thesaurus, is a vagrant, a vagabond, begging, indigent). That the answer to poverty should be hard work, true grit, self reliance and not through games of chance.

I do not claim knowledge of the show to provide wisdom as Zooey had laid out perfectly in my opening paragraphs. Nevertheless, the faces I saw were accurate representations of the poor segment of our society. Based on my viewings, they were not vagabonds. Some even manifested dignity in the face of privation.

It is for those few faces that I had glimpsed why I am writing this piece. How I wish they are articulate enough to engage in highbrow analyses as their plights are once again examined. People who rarely complete their 3x-a-day meal and merely subsist on water sometimes. They solely rest their faith to luck and the Creator.

For the benefit of the thinking force who have not watched this show, let me explain these characters as presented. They were so different from what is, by now, widely portrayed as people who were used to promote vagrancy.

What do these people do in this show? They sing, dance and even declaim/orate. Trademark countryside or urban-poor glib. Embracing life despite the harsh economic realities. These people, some of them have intermittent jobs. They collect garbage. They climb posts and fix electrical lines. They do the laundry. They are househelps. They tend small sari-sari stores.

The host often asked the participants how much they earn or if without a job, if the spouse is gainfully employed. They were also queried as to how they apportion their meager income to their families. It was from this show that I learned how much workers in an ice plant get. And that there is a difference in pricing for crushed ice and ice tubes. Some of these people receive P150/day. Their children sometimes help by doing labor themselves instead of going to school. How they breed largely might perhaps give one a starting point as to where the country’s population program is heading. They regaled common, often heard stories. Had I been not educated and gotten so blasé about my state of unemployment by covering it with the anti-climactic “But, I want to write”, I would easily be among these people who could use some game winning.

Greedy, they are not-if you put them in a habitable surrounding. One participant who looked like she was in need of help herself, forfeited her chance to receive her winning money because an opponent’s mother was sick. Some were separated from their husbands and/or wives. There were women who raised their children all by themselves. One time, the host asked one woman what, if there be any, her message was to the erring husband. With steel nerves, the woman unhaltingly said : “Wag ka ng bumalik sa akin!” How many wives have balls like that?

If everyone considered the prizes as dole-outs, one may be surprised again that instead of alternately choosing those shiny motorcycles and jeepneys, most of them chose money “to begin”. How? They wanted to return to their provinces and hope to be more productive in their places of origin. Money was used to send their children back to school. To help their sick parents. In short, these needs were immediate and urgently required. In one instance, the winner chose the money but divided it among those whom he beat in the game. His reason? So that more families will benefit from it.

In a macro picture, that is easily translatable. We know the congressional probes conducted on misappropriated public funds running to millions and millions of pesos. I said to my mother : “That show was giving away a mere P2 million on its anniversary. Paltry when you compare that with those funds under investigation. But look at its impact to a lot of people.” In short, the people profiled generally as pawns to vagrancy can offer better dynamics on how one fruit can benefit all by spreading it rightly, constructively as had been displayed by that one participant. I would pick him over someone with a degree who spends months diagramming how to cop out of a shady deal.

But as it is, the magnitude of that want had been misread. Throngs, they came. And some sacrificed their lives. If you want to present more ironic irony to that, I do not know what it will be.

My assumption is : these people can ably work; these people are not beggars; these people are not lazy if you provide them with jobs as Jeffrey Sachs had articulated in his book. Just give them a chance to reach the first rung out of poverty. If the common notion is to pin them more as to their dependence on luck and fate as encouraged by this show, we should have missed the larger and more significant values they had nakedly displayed. Stepping out of that show, some of these people would rather choose to become night scavengers than steal in order to eat. On deeper probing, they could teach one that wisdom sometimes comes from having experienced strife.

Sure there are structures to provide them with jobs but how accessible are these to the levels of competence as required by these jobs? Have they been given adequate learning mechanisms to compete in that labor market where even doctors choose to become nurses to earn better? This is no longer a talk of vagrancy promotion : there is a burning and crucial gap out there where structures had not responded as fast in providing rescue to hunger and joblessness. Laziness is no longer an option to lay the blame into. If there is an equivalent of this show in structured public forms to respond to those exigent needs----right on the spot----visible and transparent for the whole society to see, were the deliveries adequate, timely and responsive? How do you mount a job fair for people whose skills are confined to laundry? Yet, these are honorable jobs they had dutifully eked out. Who are willing to provide business talks to people who can ably fix faucet leaks but learn no other trade? If cooperatives and micro financing are in place, do these fit in the general capacities of the workers?

As a whole, these people never seem to give up on themselves either. They can still sing; they can still dance; they can still talk; you can humor them because their concept of dignity I think is receiving sincere smiles from people so “unlike” them and not solely to greedily dip their hands into the P2,000 they could get out of showing their false teeth. They can still express their thanks. The old and the sickly visit the program just to give the host a kiss. Perhaps, they saw in him a warmth secluded from the cold facade of their home surroundings if they have homes. One time, the host slightly scolded some of his staff when an unaided grandmother was left unattended as she was climbing up the stage. I also saw in this show balikbayans who willingly embrace people with no means.

I have a friend who recently went home from abroad and I kidded her why she did not pass by the show since she can be considered as a true “balikbayan” already. She said, she is ashamed that she can only give 50 pounds. You get the idea that had she much more money to spare, she would give all of that. Her brother then cited an episode where some retired teachers became the chosen contestants. He liked it. Instead of the prizes dangled, he had retentive anecdotes of those faces; how they corrected the sentences; how in spurts sometimes, the host would honestly say if there was one word to be spelled correctly: “Di ko rin alam yun ah.”

There is always an unwritten division in entertainment I guess. One goes to concerts and there will always be reserved seats for sponsors and VIPs. That is the privilege of the business so to speak. This show, refreshingly, broke that divisive line. The celebrities stand on the side; those ordinary people sit down. Did the producers even realize how important that was to a focused watcher?

What I am pointing out is : While others saw the show as a vehicle for mendicany, I saw its other, very bright side. The Filipinos in microcosm, in one surrounding, exchanging their stories of mischief and success. By providing examples to sharing, honesty (yes, it was a point repeatedly said by the host : “Wag mandaya” when they were asked to name song titles), preferential love for the elderly and the sick, friendliness, comedy of the street-talk type, love for Philippine dialects as participants talk in Ilongo, Ilocano, Cebuano, Bicolano or fractured English as they wish and yes, even industriousness as they openly discussed about their working hours with pride. In order to eat and educate themselves, they need to sweat in factories, households and baggage counters. Majority possess great singing voices. Not all of them were there for dole-outs. Perhaps, some of them really intend to showcase their talents long confined in bass-busted karaoke boxes. Those who truly need, only wanted to start.

Start what? Start being industrious by using their money to put up businesses. Start sending their children to school. Those are the jumpstarts that do not need long years to wait on. Exactly. Promises will not make them healthy overnight. That was how Jeffrey Sachs saw the indifference of the world to this poor segment globally.

Perhaps, taking a cue on this, we should have peeled one deeper layer as to how this show mirrors us as a society. How it provided a small skylight for us to peek into lives starkingly lived in want and poverty but who desire to courageously stay afloat. They do not cry themselves to death 24 hours a day (the greatest smiles come from the countryside folks: hardened faces, untouched by urban angst). They know their soul; they know their melodies; they know their wisecracks. They may be there for the big win but unlike the profiling done in the aftermath of the stampede---they, if one had closely watched it, have more angles to that singular, studied face as splashed everywhere.

There is a huge portion of social misery out there that urgently requires a response. The treatment of these stories as showcased in a daily entertainment medium certainly overrides, increasingly overrides, everything. In the end, the show chose to adopt an in-your-face, responsive slant: it decided to be blunt and applied straight-talk rather than wax hyperboles about these social plights (Host: “Ganun lang ang kita mo sa isang araw? Papano kayo nakakain tatlong beses sa ganyang kita at anim pa ang anak mo?” Answer : “Nakakaya naman po, awa ng Diyos.”). I do not think this was even envisioned by its creators when they started conceptualizing it. Those faces and their repartees echo as a bleak social commentary of what is truly happening outside that studio.

Rightly or wrongly, the gurgling social ills and the championing traits of Filipinos were appropriately captured by the show until that tragedy.