Gone to begging everyone

YOUNG men forced to manhood in the late 1960s and early 1970s because of the mass protests, mostly knew the songs of Pete Seeger if not the life story of Seeger himself. While the children of the Filipino elite do everything to enter Harvard and strive to become masters of the universe, Seeger did the opposite. Coming from a long line of New York Brahmins, he attended Harvard only to drop out after a couple of years, to sing and write songs against war and injustice. One of his iconic anti-war songs was “Where have all the flowers gone.” At the peak of the civil rights movement in the US, he was also credited for changing “We will overcome” to “We shall overcome,” the movement’s anthem.

In the Philippine context, you change “flowers” with “workers” and you will be asking what probably is the most relevant question in this particular place and time. Where have all the workers gone, the same workers on whose tired backs economies are built? The tragedy is no one is asking this critical question. And the State, the official State, seems to evade/elide the ever-important question of what ever happened to the Filipino workingman. From time to time, the Department of Labor and Employment tiptoes issues dismal unemployment data but skips the grim broad picture to hoodwink Filipinos on the prostrate state of the working class.