The chaos in Metro Manila, especially the city ruled by the convicted economic plunderer, is actually a kind of natural order or scheme of things. Noisy thoroughfares, people coming and going, vendors selling cigarettes, sneaking in and out of traffic. Housewives doing the laundry in dwellings under bridges, overpasses--where do they relieve themselves when human nature calls? The living voices of the poor people in the squatters' colonies. The silent high-rising buildings, the palisades along the bay with murky waters where the downtrodden take their baths.
This is an inferno of sulfur and fire, if there is such a physical thing, as conceptualized by the Italian poet Dante and Bible writers. But this could be paradise for the living for how could more than five million people co-exist and appear to be happy in a space as small as Singapore, the world's sixth richest country?
It is us who create our own inferno of the living ? It is us who create our own version of Paradise, the Scriptural East of Eden, now wracked by violence and endless wars, where women are slaves and treated as garbage?
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