By Sophia Angeline G. Delantero
I lived for eleven exact years without the proper and constant presence of my mother, who works until now in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Never have I understood the need to go 7,790 kilometers away just to provide us with the education and necessities that we needed.
With that, I long for a love that is not distant, not delivered through video calls, not through letters pressed on screens, not through love boxed in packages.
I was only nine years old when I first heard, “Wala kasing pera sa Pilipinas,” but I genuinely thought it was because I demanded too much, or our family needed more money than it should. I was proved wrong.
In this obviously circus-like country, the way things are unfolding, it feels like the people are being tossed from one home court to another. My mom was and is being played by the system of the government, giving not even the bare minimum for the medical field. She is thrown over by different players who wear barong and filipiniana in a shiny brown room full of podiums.
Ronald dela Rosa, the shameless man who created the pandemonium scene of running through hallways and hysterically shouting inside a supposedly respectful room. This is also the man who wants to work remotely while receiving around 300,000 every month, amounting to 2.1 million in seven months.
I am in my utmost gut to blame people of his kind for why I had to live independently during my formative years, years of craving the real signature of my mom on the waivers required by the school. It was years of figuring things out on my own. This, with all my madness and despair, is their fault in all possible ways.
Thus, the way the minority bloc walked away from the unfair game was a breath of fresh air. They are, however, just the lesser evils inside the court. While it is a disrespect to the senators in the majority, it is, by then, a respectful act for the Filipino people.
The ache of watching our parents crawl through sacrifices is nothing but torture. Why did this even happen? How did we let that happen?
I hope, in the near future, we will also have the guts to walk out of the court and challenge the norms set by our senators, the public servants who betrayed us, who kept on spinning the ball and throwing it again into another court of different colors.
Never have I understood the need to go 7,790 kilometers away just to provide us with the education and necessities that we needed. But maybe Bato knows the reason why. I know he knows that he and his people are the reasons why.**
