Wowowee Tragedy: Hardly A Bolt from the Blue

By Sarah Raymundo*

"To lend a voice to suffering is the condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject; its most subjective experience, its expression is objectively conveyed"  -Theodore Adorno, Negative Dialectics

The critical turn to the condition of poverty, posited as the root cause of the Wowowee tragedy, is at the same time a turn against its structural feature that babbles about scarcity without explaining it. Such is the manner by which the media has played up last week's disaster. Meanwhile, those of us who have witnessed the event through fragmented representations by television networks could only agonize upon the nauseating suffering of millions of Filipinos, more  than thousand of whom cued for three days for a coupon that could perhaps feed them for a couple of days more. None of their simple hopes were fulfilled. Instead, more than seventy bodies were crushed to death by others who could have died but didn't since  stampedes kill randomly.

Was it an accident? Remember how Ms. Charo Santos-Concio implied in a press conference that life is a game of chance. This seems to be ABS-CBN's sacred tenet considering the network's brand of entertainment  and "public service." If life is like a game of chance where miracles can happen any moment, then changing one's situation in life is possible at any instance so long as one wills it. So the tall tale goes while most  Filipinos are trapped in the vicious cycle of poverty due to foreign corporate plunder, government corruption, and grave social and economic inequities. When structural problems are masked as a matter of fortune, the poor can only gamble as capitalist enterprises like ABS-CBN and their corporate clients reap privatized profits systematically. When a powerful institution like the media portray the elimination of poverty as a game of chance, people in dire circumstances could only play this game and die  at random. The random manner of death mimics the invoked logic of chance.  The harrowing Wowowee tragedy was not an accident.

There is something seriously wrong about the formula of game shows such as Wowowee, as much as there is  something violent about literally telling the poor that they can help themselves by lining up for the rich's brand of public service. Can we blame the people if they ever put their stakes in this game? In a nation where the government has abdicated its function to ensure a decent life for its citizens, the reality of unemployment could only force people to deploy their bodies in any way, turning charitable drives and game shows into opportunities for the  practice of labor among the jobless. Those who flocked the ULTRA were people who believed that life could be better. Precisely the kind who refuses the idea that everything has fallen apart. They are definitely not greedy and selfish as one sociologist maliciously opined on national TV. The idea that the crowd was undisciplined and uncivilized is a vulgar propaganda in favor of the real culprits and it fails to grasp the dynamics of the stampede and its connection to the brutal and parasitic union of profit-making and structural poverty.

Every single president since 1946 had the chance of improving the lives of our people. Yet seventy years after “Philippine Independence,” the Philippine government in tandem with the mass media, peddle the idea of luck while making everybody believe that success in life is achieved through hard work. Even the megastar Sharon Cuneta, with all her wealth, has expressed her opinion on the tragedy emphasizing that she does not believe in luck. Rightfully so for luck is nothing but a mystification for various capitals (i.e. economic resources, education, social networks) accumulated in one's engagement in social life on the basis of one's location in a given societal context. Hard work, on the other hand, is an imperative for survival that can only reap substantial gains when practiced in an ideal context of a planned economy that opens up opportunities for education and decent employment. None of these seem to be the in the agenda neither of the Macapagal-Arroyo regime nor in the regimes before her. In the context of poverty and the drive for profit, the mishmash of luck and hard work promoted by the government and the mass media predisposed thousands of poor Filipinos who mustered all their strength to try their luck on Wowowee's first year anniversary.

Perhaps, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo wasn't lying anymore when she forcefully stated that the government will do everything to pin down and nail the one's who are accountable for the tragedy. It is indeed assuring to hear that from the president of the Republic.But must she get herself off the hook?

This tragedy has shown us that profit-making's twin is poverty and poverty's best friend is death. These vicious couplings must be severed by our decisive and organized efforts to realize our hopes.

*The author would like to acknowledge the illuminating and cathartic exchanges with her org-mates from the Congress of Teachers/Educators for Nationalism and Democracy (CONTEND-UP),students from several Sociology classes, and colleagues from the University of the Philippines-Diliman, Professors Joseph Palis, Namete Garcia-Dungo,Edel Garcellano, Dungo, Arnie Trinidad, Ging Guttierez and Arnold Alamon)

Posted by Bulatlat

BACK TO TOP ■  PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION  ■   COMMENT

© 2006 Bulatlat ■  Alipato Publications

Permission is granted to reprint or redistribute this article, provided its author/s and Bulatlat are properly credited and notified.