‘Crybabies’?

BUDGET Secretary Benjamin Diokno, when he was an outsider, was a critic of the economic policy of the administration of Noynoy Aquino, President Rodrigo Duterte’s predecessor. He is now among the Duterte administration’s economic managers, the ones who conceived the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion (TRAIN) law to generate revenues for government’s “Build, Build, Build” program.

The TRAIN law has received flak lately, pointed to as among the causes for the rise in the prices of commodities. TRAIN includes a hefty excise tax on petroleum products at a time when prices of crude in the international market have risen to $80 per barrel. Naturally, the same economic managers are defending the TRAIN law by insisting it plays only a small part in the spike in inflation rate.

But Diokno took the defense of the TRAIN law to a less technical level. He noted that during the administration of Gloria MacapagalArroyo, whom Aquino succeeded, global oil prices hit $135 a barrel. “So I think we should be less of a crybaby. I think we should take on,” he said. Those weren’t the only interesting words Diokno spewed in defense of the wayward TRAIN law. But let’s tackle the “crybaby” thing because it exposes the mindset many government officials hold. They just don’t get what the ordinary folks are saying, or should we say, feeling. That’s called alienation, mainly because they are ensconced in a milieu untouched by economic difficulties.

Reminds me of the so-called “Cultural Revolution” in China in the early years of communist party rule under the late Mao Zedong. That revolution was disastrous overall but one thing stood out in my mind when I read that part of Chinese history. Mao was a Marxist, meaning a believer in class struggle, and thought that the best way to change the viewpoint of society’s upper classes was to have them experience first hand how the masses of workers and peasants live.

And so the communist party ordered young intellectuals living in the cities to head to the countryside and live with the farmers. A massive movement like this one eventually sparked abuses and other forms of excesses so that when Pol Pot initiated it when the communists came to power in Cambodia it degenerated into a deadly purge of the elite, as depicted in the film, “The Killing Fields.”

But the point was made. It would be difficult to feel what the poor are suffering when one is living in luxury. It would be easy for Diokno, for examnple, to label those adversely affected by the TRAIN law as “crybabies” when he drives or is being driven in airconditioned vehicles to his airconditioned office or when he eats in expensive restaurants and is not the one who buys, say, rice and vegetables and cook these for himself and his family.

The poor complain every time prices of commodities rise because they do not have the money to spend for these. They are not being crybabies; they only want their families to survive the economic downturn. If only Diokno and other government officials like him try living with these poor people in their hovels for even just a week. Tan-awon nato’g di ba mo motyabaw.