It’s easy to dismiss them, those protesting jeepney drivers, for being the cause of all our suffering, the harshest we’ve ever experienced in our young, miserable lives: they’ll bring us to school in the morning, only to leave us stranded, or else-bone tired with all those walking. The Acad Oval has never been this crowded, throngs of people aimlessly marching, cursing to high heavens those wretched, insensitive jeepney drivers.

Of course, it’s much easier. We don’t really feel oppressed by the system, do we? A hike of just a few pesos in oil prices has the slightest impact on our allowance which, by the way, comes from somebody else’s hard work, at least for most of us. What do we care when transport fares increase by 50 cents, or even a peso? A peso is not even enough for a stick of cigarette, unless it’s Champion, or a chunk of spicy, garlic-y siomai. At most, a peso can get you a piece of V-Fresh gum, or one fish ball and you’ll still have about 30 cents left.

And yet, and yet. Since the enactment of the oil deregulation law over a decade ago, prices of oil products have risen by hundreds of percentage. Under the current dispensation, pump prices of oil have increased by over 250 percent since 2001. The peso continues to register strongly versus the dollar, and the fact is that oil products have long been in storage and should ideally remain unaffected by changes in the market. And yet.

Must we therefore heap praises upon the big transport groups which refused to cooperate with the protesting drivers, believing that it is better to negotiate with the government and oil companies on the table than on the streets? Can we actually plead with those greedy capitalists not to further increase oil prices as it only pushes people into the brink of abject poverty? Can we even ask the government to intervene and put a halt to such iniquity, when it is these same people who benefit from maintaining such penurious set-up?

And yet we do not know that the protesting drivers can just choose to demand a hike in jeepney fares, instead of staging a demonstration, which certainly robbed them of a day’s worth of earnings, to call for a rollback in oil prices.

We have become so comfortable with our own, isolated conditions, that for as long as we’re able to go to class, impress our minimum-wage-earning professor, and graduate with honors to bolster our chances of finding a decent-paying job in multi-national corporations, to hell with looking at the bigger picture, or finding the most wicked conspiracies even in something as cheap as a 4-peso oil price hike.

We can always look the other way. Those wretched drivers. Are we better off? #Philippine Collegian

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