I saw her one afternoon on my way downtown.
God only knows where she was going; she didn’t seem to know. She sat in the subway car with a look that were anything but kind- somewhere from abject vacancy to total horror .
The plastic catch bag on her lap carries fragments of the usual moral declarations and advice, broken here into meaningless strings: “…Are More Important than Money”- “Life is…”- “…will be sufficient”… SWEAT …ice a day”- and boldest of all, “Breathe” –as though she needed to remember it.
And here she rides, rides, rides, clanking along in heavy steel, deep below the streets of New York, empty and alone; while all around around her the great machines of America grind on. Millions of people each give the flywheel a little push from time to time, and it keeps on turning.
Everything works. The trains run, the water runs, the power is uninterrupted. But not because of her, or men and women like her, and there are many of them.
And they sometimes wind up here in Dumaguete. They have pensions, or settlements, or some independent means, and nothing to do. Some vague idea of moral service bubbles into their minds from the mottos on their handbags or posters on public walls.
Here, they find themselves in demand among people whose needs are desperate. Surrounded by smiles and open hands, they begin to think themselves pillars of the community, entitled to what they consider to be “ordinary consideration” for who they are.
When things don’t work, when services are slow, when government agencies don’t respond quickly enough to their requests for help, they complain loudly to their local friends, who are insulted- they are in charge here, and don’t see that they should be subject to the moral demands of outsiders, no matter how well intentioned.
And they’re right. But they should also realize that the Americans they see as imperious and demanding, are really only ignorant and confused in a situation they don’t understand. They came here thinking that the whole world was what they always knew; that everywhere was home. No one at home had told them different. Now they’re like the woman on the subway: vacant and horrified, with a bag full broken moral fragments and advice. They need to learn to BREATHE again, in different air, at a different speed.
