Having grown up in a land of in-your-face poverty, my take on the disease is a bit less politically-correct. And being at heart part of a society where living unsustainably and beyond one’s means has always been a national way of life, I find I have less capacity for dishing out cliched platitudes on the subject that today’s “poverty” theme on Blog Action Day seems to want us to cough up.

We aim to raise awareness, initiate action and to shake the web.

But of course we will.

Unlike mlq3, I feel no obligation to be apologetic to the poor. Make no mistake, I’ve come to this state of mind after years of battling a mindset deeply-ingrained by decades of guilt-ravaged Catholic upbringing — that thinking and (que horror!) expressing such sentiments will incur His wrath and a descent upon me by a legion of His angels to carry me onto the ragged shoes of the least of His flock that I may learn to appreciate the extent of His love and mercy.

No thanks. Life’s too short and precious to be weighed down by a culturally-induced anxiety like that.

I’d rather live by the spirit of a far more straightforward outlook beautifully illustrated in this photo:

Poverty in the Philippines is a simple issue to me as it comes down to this simple textual equation:

We locked ourselves into commitments beyond any inherent ability in us to honour them.

It’s a self-evident formula that is applicable across four inescapable parameters around which our utter failure to prosper as a society can be quantified in black-and-white in a balanced scorecard:

:) Population
:) Consumption

:( Production
:( Capital

The first two, population and consumption, are relevant to the first part of the sentence, and the latter two are relevant to the second part. We laughed our way through the first two, and muddled along the latter two.

Result: POVERTY on a grand national scale.

It’s simple, really.

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