Dark and stormy clouds cover the whole city as over a hundred different sounds produced by screaming cars and the husky voices of shouting barkers fill everyone's ears. Of course, the latter's usually the job of the environmental gore brought by air pollution, but nobody gives a shit about how millions of germs and viruses are easily entering their system with every intake of air everyone does. What they simply give a shit about is how the hell did the prices of everything rose up in a snap. And yeah, how the government is being so superficial by giving out subsidies that will surely not help.
A dirty kid whose ostentatiously minuscule physique is enough to kill her on her own creeps through the glass door of a supermarket. The new security guard takes his cap off with his right hand, and consequently pulls his blue handkerchief that his wife have folded in a square and wipes his sweat off his forehead. He puts the cap back again and walks to the glass door to stop that kid from entering again. His boss had reprimanded him once about letting street children enter the vicinity of their supermarket saying that it's 'too posh to be filled with dirty people'. In reality, he is technically a dirty person, because by his boss' definition, dirty people are those whole live in the nearby squatter's area and who are evidently filthy-looking and grubby-smelling. And he still doesn't know how the hell he was able to get inside.
A teenage girl who just bore her second baby three weeks ago stands at the end of the longest line she'd seen. She knows that she arrived too late, because she's already hearing the rumbling of the engine of the NFA truck. After a second or three, the line she was in before had suddenly disappeared as those hungry victims of poverty disperse quietly. She nods her head and walks away, back to her grubby house. It seems that for the second day, her two sons will be begging their neighbor for a cup of rice yet again. She knows it's not her fault that her husband forgot to leave her with another twenty-pesos. He forgot again that they live too far from that place the NFA truck would usually park at. It's a good thing her sister gave her fifty-pesos, at the least.
And while a small percentage of the country are thinking of what they will wear the next day, the remaining are holding their grumbling stomachs that are slowly tearing each and everyone of them apart and somehow still thinking of where they will get the money to buy food at the present.
The gloomy atmosphere of the Thursday afternoon offers the greatest and most accurate description of how our country has been feeling for the last five or so years. It's hard to think how we've been all unfair to our heroes who shed their own lives for this weird-shaped country of ours. They fought with their all might just to set us all free, and here goes the government trying to imprison their own citizens. Is this all worth the sacrifice?
I think not.
Our independence is nowhere to be found, for we are all incarcerated by poverty and violence caused by no less than the people who should be alleviating such. We have yet to find out the taste of the being free, the kind that goes way beyond our imaginations and dreams. And as of now, freedom from all the burden we're all carrying is the last thing they can give us.
How ironic for an independent country.
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