The poor do not go crazy easily

Lost in the euphoria over the successful rescue of 33 Chilean miners trapped for 69 days several miles underground was the seemingly obsessive speculation about their mental health by Western journalists.

Of course, worries about their sanity are natural. To be trapped for more than two months in the bowels of the earth, with hope of rescue remaining to be a big uncertainty until each miner finally breaks into the fresh air up above, can be a very harrowing and unsettling ordeal.

Nobody but nobody can ever speculate on what the 33 miners must have gone through except the 33 miners themselves. Not even the most learned and experienced mind experts can imagine what it much have been truly like.

Thus, as the whole world watched the live television coverage of the rescue, western journalists never let go of the fact that once rescued, all the miners will be made to spend some time with the mind doctors to be checked for, well, loose screws.

But as the first miner came up, then the next, and the next, and so on and so forth, with one of them even bringing a small sack full of rocks that he promptly gave away as souvenirs, it became instantly evident that they were perfectly all right.

To Filipinos watching the television coverage, it became clear the western journalists had no inkling what a life of hardship does to the nerves of people. As hardship steels us, so it does the Chilean miners. They are a hardy lot like us. Like us, they do not crack easily. Western expectations must learn to consider immersion in hardship as a psychologically mitigating factor.

To be sure, with a per capita income of about $14,000 compared to our roughly $4,000 it can be said that Chileans are better off than we. But that is only because there are so few of them while there are just too many of us. We rank 12th in population, they 60ish or something.

But there is no denying that, in the larger scales of economics, they are just as poor as we are. And there is a certain hardiness associated with being poor, a hardiness that comes from having to adapt to conditions seldom experienced in western countries.

Hardships have the capacity to steel body and character in ways that sophistication and modernity never can. A cosmopolitan New Yorker, without meaning to disparage that great city and its people, thrust into the same tunnel with the 33, will probably emerge as the only one zonked.

That is why the western journalists covering the rescue laid great emphasis on the mental aspect of the trapped miners. They have been conditioned to imagine hardship in the context of western cosmopolitan living, where almost everything is easy and goes according to plan.

When things start to go wrong or not according to plan, westerners often get disoriented and break down. Steeped from birth in order and comfort, they fail to adapt and adjust to chaos and mayhem. 

There is an observation that is widely held here in the Philippines that says a shrink quickly gets rich in the west because people there cannot handle stress very well. In developing states, shrinks end up looking like raisins.

Now, I know that observation is unsubstantiated and without any real scientific basis. In other words, it can be dead wrong. Nevertheless, it is an observation that persists. And the reason it persists is observable and readily apparent to those who care to look around.

While the ordeal the miners went through was unimaginable, it was not unthinkable for them to emerge from that ordeal with their marbles intact. For they were people used to hardship, the kind that can easily drive westerners crazy, the kind western journalists expected to see.

People who are no strangers to the face of poverty are not likely to scare easily about dying, for all too often, poverty is just death calling with a notice to disconnect. To these people, physical pain and inconvenience are actually reminders for them to keep breathing.