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Passion For Reason

That video of a Good Samaritan on Edsa

By: Raul C. Pangalangan
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Thursday, August 2nd, 2012

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbQNVRd_Yio#

(Editor’s note: INQUIRER.net has been given permission by Lyndon Santos, who took the video which is the subject of Dean Raul Pangalangan’s column today, to post this on our site. We saw it fit to post it alongside Dean Pangalangan’s column)

The other day, I saw a short video that was making the rounds via Facebook. It was taken by motorist Lyndon Santos while he was caught in traffic under the Edsa-Timog flyover in Quezon City last Monday. The video showed a young woman giving her coat to a young girl, perhaps five or six years old, apparently naked until then. There was more than just a drizzle. Typhoon “Gener” was raging, after all, and the other pedestrians were seen running past with their umbrellas.

The young woman had stopped to take the hooded coat off her back, and had knelt down to button or zip it up neatly around the child. After giving the child a gentle pat, the young woman rushed off—I imagine, to start her working day. The video clip lasted all of 35 seconds but it was moving, and I hope her fine example (and Lyndon’s initiative to post it for all to see) would be repeated countless times in quiet acts of charity that affirm our innate humanity and bring out the noble self that inheres in each one of us.

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Edsa is one such place. It is indeed difficult to be a Good Samaritan on Edsa. In fact Edsa embodies the Filipino in his atomized worst, the Darwinian Pinoy who thrives in a dog-eat-dog world and makes a virtue out of merely being a survivor. If you want to picture what a “harsh and cruel world” looks like, imagine the life of those who live under the flyovers of Edsa. When Hobbes spoke of a world where raged a “war of all against all,” he could very well have been thinking of driving through Edsa.

But therein lies the irony. Edsa also epitomizes the proudest, most glorious moment of recent Philippine history, the triumph of the anti-Marcos uprising that restored our democracy. The 1986 Edsa Revolution is the emblem of the Filipino’s capacity to risk his life for the glorious cause of freedom, the courage of unarmed civilians willing to block advancing tanks with their own bodies.

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What the miracle woman teaches us is that if we wish to live out our transformative mission in the here and now, we can do it ourselves in the course of our daily work. No need to wait for the next Edsa 1. Find your own Edsa 1 under every flyover, under every bridge. We should stop thinking that the civic self appears only during big historical moments or, worse, during ceremonies and at monuments. John F. Kennedy said it with flourish: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” Except that on Edsa, you must see your country in the eyes of the naked, needy child.

The miracle woman on Edsa showed us, in the words of a Facebook post, that “there are still good and kind people out there.” By her example, she taught us that we can make a difference in simple ways, and that we needn’t wait for some big historical moment or some dramatic political issue to lend a helping hand. She also reminds us that doing good calls for actual sacrifice. She gave up a coat; her act of kindness did cost her something. She gave up a rain jacket during a typhoon; she risked getting wet and sick and she would’ve had to worry whether the typhoon would still bring rainfall on her way home.

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Is kindness now a rarity in Manila?

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i don't think so.  i don't want to believe so.  what is rare is that someone else notices it.  and acknowledges it.

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