The red of our idyllic Christmas used to be the red bracts, the leaves rather, of the poinsettia. Or the red in Santa Claus winter wear. Or the red in the nose of Rudolph, the reindeer of the Arctic/ Nordic mythology that has been embraced by people celebrating the season in the tropics for generations — and without reservations at that. The uplifting red, the luminous red, the red that symbolizes the universality of the Yuletide traditions. The red of the gift wrappers that suggests joy and good tidings.
Never have we associated the Christmas red with the red of blood senselessly spilled and spilled in pursuit of man’s worst and basest instinct or with Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” Yet, this happened a few days before the holy birth in the manger. And in a province that has gained national renown for and has been particularly proud of its Belenismo tradition —Tarlac.
In Paniqui town on Dec. 20, 2020, a police officer, SMS Jonel Nuezca, shot in cold blood a mother and son over the most minor of disputes. He shot Sonya Gregorio, 52, at the back of the head. She fell to the ground while embracing her son whom she intended to protect from Nuezca. He fired a second time at Sonya after she collapsed on the ground. Nuezca aimed to finish both as he shot Frank, the 25-year-old son Sonya tried to protect, also at the head to make sure he would take no imaginary prison-ers. Then, he aimed another shot at the prostrate Frank.
The subtext was the total lack of remorse and the grim determination to write off human lives. The same lack of remorse in the cold, dead heart of Nuezca’s teenaged daughter who watched the gory, senseless snuffing out of human lives without a tinge of worry and concern. Nuezca even fled from the crime scene and surrendered, as if the surrender were an afterthought, in Rosales, Pangasinan.
The red blood that spilled out of the prostrate mother and son turned dark the next minute. Dark, as in the overall mood of Filipinos this Christmas. Dark and gloomy.
The photo of Sonya Gregorio’s 94-year mother in a solitary watch over the two coffins of her departed might as well be the unspoken sentiment of most Filipinos in this season of supposed joy and merriment and good tidings. Sadness of the unspoken kind. And data say this kind of unexpressed melancholy is, indeed, the gloomy reality on the ground.
In a survey taken from November 21 to 25, the Social Weather Stations found that 62 percent of adult Filipinos bemoaned that quality of life got worse this year. Only 14 percent said lives got better and for 24 percent, life was unchanged. In Metro Manila, the sentiment had the figure equivalent of -55 per-cent, which meant “catastrophic.” Or dire, or grim. Or calamitous. No matter how one tries to project the artifice of joy and celebration in the besieged metropolis, the giant shadow of gloom hovers.
For the 16 percent, which is equivalent to more than 4 million families across the usual hamlets of hardscrabble lives, existence took a grimmer turn, the 4 million families belong to the cohort that suffer from involuntary hunger. Simply put, they skip meals because there is no food available and access to food is limited.
(While the pets of the very rich get grooming and nail cuts at the animal clinics — and get special talcum powders — 4 million families have no access to three meals of rice and fried eggs or rice and sardines. We have a general idea on how they will spend this Christmas — thinking that they have been spared of the fate of the Gregorios and glad to be alive despite the frequent and involuntary encounter with hunger.)
The November survey just confirmed another sad reality — most Filipinos feel poor. The survey said 48 percent rated themselves as poor while another 36 percent rated themselves as “borderline poor,” the Hades in economic status. This is 84 percent of the total. One push and the 36 percent would be in the hellish ground of real poverty.
Calamitous 2020 will end not with a bang but with a whimper. A gloomy Christmas and a real fear of uncertainty as the nation celebrates New Year.
While the country’s economic managers are optimistic of a big rebound after the meltdown of this year — GDP this year is expected to contract at the range of 8.5 percent to 9.5 percent, the worst de-cline in the country’s post-war history — there are no fundamentals to back up the projection of a 6.5 percent growth in 2021 and a miracle rebound of 8 percent to 10 percent in 2022.
Oxford Economics, the UK-based think tank, surveyed the Covid-19 scarring of 162 countries and concluded that the Philippines will only recover after a grim, painful slog, not a miracle-like rebound from 2021 and forward.
In fact, Oxford Economics listed five countries that would struggle to eke out a decent recovery and the Philippines was number one on the list of the five countries. In the countries where the Covid-19 scars would linger long enough, the Philippines was on top of the list.
The World Bank said the same after a survey of the Covid-19 scarring across the globe. “The Philippines will remain well-placed to bounce back. But again, it will not be over for the Philippines until it is over for the rest of the world,” the World Bank said.
That is the polite version of “PH will be last on the recovery train.”
The road to recovery, borrowing from Robert Frost, would be “gloomy, dark and deep.”