Some children died the other day, we feed machines and then we pray
Looked up and down and mortified, you should have seen the ratings that day
We are the nobodies, wanna be somebodies
When we’re dead, they know just who we are.- Marilyn Manson, “The Nobodies”
Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death
A year ago, when I first came here to Manila, I took a picture of that boy on the left to remind myself of at least one dark underbelly of this Metropolis. A hungry kid begging, lying down on a concrete landing of the stairs up Shaw Boulevard Station, ignored in favor of trains up there, and work hours down there.
Just another victim, just another statistic. No one knew this kid’s name as he lay there, dying of hunger, exposure, thirst, ascaris. Even I didn’t know; all I knew was the spare change I dropped into the cup was more for him and less for me.
Whatever loose change I gave that kid that day means absolutely nothing today, one year into all of it. For all intents and purposes of speculation, that kid is still begging there, perhaps. Maybe sick, starving, and for all intents and purposes, dead. Dead to the world that leaves him dying.
We regret their death, we mourn their passing. We get shocked at the very reason why they die. Yet it is not a limitation of words or an error of vocabulary why we do not have a feeling for those who are dying. Why they pass by our feet without us grieving, or perhaps pitying, even feeling. Why – and what – we think and feel… and if we grieve at all, as they lay there dying.
