Lazarus at the gate

MANILA, Philippines - Once there was a man named Lazarus — not the resurrected one — who begged outside the gates of a rich man who gave him only the crumbs that fell from his table. When Lazarus died, he was brought to Abraham’s bosom in Heaven, while the rich man suffered the fires of Hell. Tormented, the rich man begged Abraham to let Lazarus dip his fingers in water and cool his tongue, but Abraham said that in life he enjoyed good things while Lazarus suffered evil and thus now he suffered torment.

Lazarus, while justly rewarded, and poetically so, resonates in my mind, when I think of how the present regime views the poorest of the poor. It seemed that we would make of them a Lazarus by fostering a “culture of dependency”; one that the Conditional Cash Transfer, the centerpiece anti-poverty program of the government, will initiate for 2.3 million poor families. Isn’t that letting the downtrodden more dependent on aid? Or, to be more aptly biblical, would that not give them fish for the day rather than teach them to fish for life?

I will no longer dwell on the cold logistics — the massive hiring of personnel to implement the project; the additional classrooms to contain the children of this present day Lazarus; the necessary health facilities for childbirth alone — these are facts for statisticians and implementors. What I ask is fundamentally more cultural; a paradigm shift from the feudal mindset that plague the deprived and make him wait for crumbs outside the cacique’s gate rather than forge his own destiny. With the CCT, what we make is, as Luke 16:19-31, puts it “besides all these, and between us and you there is a great gulf fixed so that those who want to pass from here to you cannot, nor can those from there pass to us. For as long as this dependency, so deeply ingrained in us is poised as sanctioned government move, then for so long will the chasm exist between the privileged and the poorest of the poor.

Even in the Land of Plenty, patronage can dispossess. Recently California’s Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, cut childcare subsidies to poor working mothers. With no means to pay for those who’ll tend to their children while they work, mothers will now have to quit — and be again on welfare’s ward.

Yes, let us help the poorest of the poor. But let us not make of them a Lazarus. Unchain them from the fetters of dependency. — IKE C. GUTIERREZ, former Press Undersecretary