I just had to write this one.

Last night, I watched silently enthralled inside a restaurant (not one of those swanky, fancy dining places but an ordinary but popular one in the city) as a typical laborer’s family ( no offense meant really now, but  it was quite obvious from the outward appearance of the characters) gorged, literally gorged, on the food at a table. No pretenses, no conscious table manner observance, no frills in their dining-out clothes — but definitely with money to burn. For the food ordered, at least. 

I was watching, I mused, one of thousands of poor Pinoy families eking out a living in a nation now flapping its wings at having achieved for the first quarter of the year a 5.5 Gross National Product (GNP), up from something lower for the same period last year, or so the NEDA says.

The father, weatherbeaten face, in faded jeans and equally faded t-shirt, was taking his soup with a loud slurp while his four kids, all boys, attacked the pancit guisado, lumpia shanghai and a little cup of ice cream each with gusto. The mother, as most women usually are, was a bit more reserved with her spoonfuls, amost tentatively eyeing her surroundings every now and then as though siently apologizing for her brood’s undisguised hunger.

It was apparently a Big Night  Out for the family, the scrawny erpat perhaps deciding to treat his wife and family to something “extraordinary” after earning megabucks from a hard day’s toil. Megabucks of a thousand pesos perhaps that is the equivalent of a hundred pesos to most blue-collar workers ten, fifteen years back. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the family hied off to the nearest moviehouse from the restaurant after; they left ahead of me as I waited for my take-out order.

Inwardly, I thought I would be so happy to see more and more of such very ordinary families eating out and savoring the “uxury of being served” in restaurants, not doing the “serving” themselves. Now, that would be the perfect proof of an economy really going up and up, wouldn’t it?

Frankly, seeing the middle-income and the upper crust frequenting restaurants and fine dining places, no matter their numbersand frequency of dining and the smackeroos they spend for their food doesn’t at all translate to an economy going robust. It only means these slobs and fancy dressers are cornering most of the goodies while the bigger majority of the unwashed are hardly getting any.

That is hard economics, maybe, but it’s a truer picture whatd’ya think?