Where entitlement is instinct

Why would there be a need to search for the roots of our national dysfunction in the lofty realms of history and ideology? One needs only to peruse social media, and we’d get a sense of everything that’s wrong with the world.

Or you can troll parking lots, or CCTV footage of road ragers, even in the absence of roads. Maybe you’d chance upon her or him, standing neither as a landowner nor a surveyor, and certainly not as a traffic enforcer.

Just a citizen occupying a rectangle of asphalt like it’s an inheritance, head buried in a smartphone, and, maybe, singing “The Exodus Song,” minus the exodus.

“This land is mine, God gave this land to me.” Yeah, yeah. And it’s not even land where you can build a house on, let alone raise a family. For crying out loud, it’s just a parking space being bodily reserved.

We laugh at this, we post it online, and we call it “diskarteng Pinoy.” We even defend it: “May matanda kasi, malayo pa ang parking, konting konsiderasyon naman.” And thus does injustice always begin, with a wry smile.

This is how public space dies: not in coups, not in revolutions, but in small acts of appropriation tolerated by everyone because they are minor, because they are familiar, because we ourselves do them when convenient.

The parking slot is public property. But in practice, it becomes the private domain of whoever is bold enough to seize it and shameless enough to defend it. Sounds familiar?

We are shocked when powerful families corner industries, when politicians treat public funds as family allowances, and when officials behave as if the state were a family corporation. But why should we be? We have rehearsed the logic in parking lots long ago.

Yet, this petty entitlement can turn deadly.

There have been reports over the years of fistfights, stabbings, even shootings over parking spaces. One incident, long ago in a public cemetery during All Souls’ Day, ended in fatal gunplay after two drivers raced each other to a lone slot.

A sacred day for remembering the dead acquired one more name on the list — all for a patch of ground no bigger than a dining table. What irony. That is how absurd it gets. Asphalt becomes territory, territory becomes ego, ego becomes rage, and rage, occasionally, becomes a body on the pavement.

The Metro Manila Council is now considering banning people from physically reserving parking slots. Congress, not to be outdone, has reportedly filed a “Mindful Parking Act” to penalize the practice.

Imagine that. A nation so incapable of observing basic fairness that it must legislate what any child on a playground understands: you cannot sit on the swing just because your friend is “on the way.”

We do not lack laws. We lack the habit of respecting what does not belong to us. The woman in the parking slot is not the cause of our national troubles. She is the symptom — of a culture where entitlement is instinct, rules are negotiable, and consideration is optional.

We call it resourcefulness. It is, more accurately, a rehearsal for impunity. And until we learn to respect a painted white rectangle on asphalt, we will continue to wonder why those in power do not respect the Constitution, or us, the taxpayers.