Usok.
You’re seeing it right. Smoke under the bridge. And rain. As the idiom goes, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire”, definitely, there was in this case.
Ramon Magsaysay Boulevard-Legarda Bridge.
Like another idiom, ‘go underground’, copper or tanso trade is oftentimes done in secret. A kilogram of this metal sells for around P300. A trade of this metal goes underground in cases when the source of the tanso is not fair (can’t actually say ‘illegal’ illegal), like, stolen from loose, or cut and dangling electric wires, grounding cables from any sort of electric facilities, and the like.
Normally, no-good-for-use or damaged electric appliances can be a source of copper. The electric fan, for example, has a good amount of copper (from its motor).
Well in this case, this man went ‘under the bridge’.
Apparently, the smoke was coming from underneath the bridge. That’s where he started the fire. He probably found himself in a risky situation and dragged the burning loot outside on a more open space. The bridge and the road above almost got covered with smoke.
He was burning the rubber cover (insulator) of the wire to have the copper exposed.
Like not contended with the dirty water and the garbage this man is on, he simply didn’t mind about the additional pollution he was causing —not to mention his face was almost ‘in’ the black smoke. P300, for the benefit of some, is not that far off from the minimum a worker earns a day. And what more to those who aren’t even employed and whose incomes are not stable (or sure)?
This burning thing maybe is not a crime. Maybe he didn’t steal it, let’s say. But, my point? This is just one of the many things that a man will do to survive without even thinking about the harmful effects of his acts to the very place he lives in.
He may reason out, “So what? Probably, by the time this river is dead and its water fatal, by the time the ozone has depleted, and by the time the Earth’s climate is totally messed up, I’m long before dead. What I need is to survive the day. Each day.”
I don’t know where I’m going with this article. I’ll slow down for I myself is guilty of some acts that is not helping the issue. I just found that act, that moment, extremely offensive.
It was a slum and I was a dayo. (And I couldn’t simply ignore or make fun of a sigang babae, “Pipiktyuran pa oh, gusto mong mabasag mukha mo?”)
Source: elriz
