Desperate Times?

What happened to our country in the last two months?

That was what my friend wanted to know after she returned from a two-month trip. Explaining the reason for her question, she told of how shocked she was at the preponderance of what she termed "crocodiles" at our airport. Going through customs, she revealed, inspectors swarmed around her, pointedly asking questions and making comments like "O, ano ba ang laman n’yan? Meron ba kami d’yan?" "May pasalubong ba kami?" "O, ma’am, bahala ka na sa amin, ha?" Straight out, harap-harapan, without any pretense at discretion.

Managing to extricate herself from that mess, she wheeled her one suitcase–yes, one suitcase, and no balikbayan box either, believe it or not–out of the terminal building, and was promptly greeted by another swarm of about 20 people trying to grab her suitcase and about 20 others trying to help her get it into her car–and all of them asking for something "for the boys". When she gave token tips for services she neither asked for nor wanted, they barked, "Kulang naman ’yan; papaano naman kami?"

"It wasn’t at all like that when I left," she lamented, pointing out that it wasn’t two years but merely two months ago (just before the new year) when she left. Nor was it like that the last time she flew in, which wasn’t all that long ago, since her work requires a lot of travel.

So what happened the past two months? We celebrated Edsa 2, then Edsa 1; the Americans came in for Balikatan 02-01, resulting in part of the general population tittering excitedly about all the guapos in Zamboanga and another part screaming imperialismo and accusing the President of being an "Am-girl"; 8,500 people lost or are going to lose (based on closure and retrenchment notices filed with the Labor Department) their jobs in the country; the First Son got engaged to his second cousin; Alma Moreno and Joey Marquez called it quits.

At a lunch recently with some ex-military folk I commented that I got two flat tires after passing through C-5, where nails are scattered on a section of the road supposedly by owners of vulcanizing shops located further down the road. One of them reacted with the question, "Are times so bad and people so desperate, they resort to doing things like that just to make some money?"

To answer the question at the start of this column: Ditto.