I don’t know about you people but a door-to-door salesman weighs me down. For a keen observer, a typical door-to-door salesman is that distressed looking ambler who basks in the nasty glare of the sun typically clad in a besmeared shirt and a borrowed necktie. A boxed set of China-manufactured kitchen knives or single samples of Science books would be resting on his sleeved arm while a travel bag hangs on another.

To a door-to-door salesman, the “back-off” hand gesture is already an accepted form of rebuff. He has learned, through innumerable occasions of having it held before his face, to take it the same way a battered wife would contain a blow in the head: muted, passive and incredibly accepting.

I remember vividly an incident back in my middle-school days which transpired in my father’s medical clinic. Two women clothed in identical red and white uniforms came staggering to the receiving area where I was seated comfortably with my tube of sari-sari store-bought iced candy. The straps of the box-like postman’s bags which one of them was almost dragging on dirt gave in from the pressure of the burden resulting to tiny packets of laundry soap blanketing the office floors. I stared down at the sea of red and white Tide logos and looked up only when one of the women cried out. The woman, who had suffered a heat stroke, collapsed and conked her head on concrete. My father stitched her up and received six packets of soap as a miserable fee. After the two had left, my father reminded me that if I dropped out of school because of my continuous tardiness, I would end up like them: underprivileged detergent soap salesgirls.

The Philippines is a label-conscious country. Unlike in most Western countries where a high-school diploma can serve as a passport to a reasonable and decent employment, not being able to attend college in the Philippines is a precursor to doom: you end up doing graveyard shifts as a poorly paid security personnel or work as a promo girl for sanitary napkins in a supermarket.

One of my many frustrations as a human being is the sad fact that we are all breathing in a meritocratic society. Persons working blue-collar jobs gain little to no assistance in shoe shops, get the unimportant tables in eating places and hardly receive any nods at church on a Sunday service. On the contrary, people who work important jobs in their perfumed pinstripes enjoy the privileges of a glorified white-collar employee.

The intellectual experts in the field of Economics would argue that the cause of a country’s economic decline is the decrease in production via industrialization and failure to produce more equitable income distribution among classes and regions. I would say it is the mounting hypocrisy that is plaguing our society like a terrible black cancer.

But then again, in a conservative government like ours, organized hypocrisy exists.




This is a writing exercise I wrote as part of my training for the Editor-in-Chief/Associate Editor position for The Benildean. The exercise was given to me by the former News/Managing Editor, BJ David. The goal of the exercise is to test if I could, even for once, think out of my element and create something which is foreign to me: compassion (or so they say!).

This essay is unfinished because of the pressure of the deadline. I'm still working on a better conclusion and maybe a few add-ups.