BECAUSE it is a concept that carries its staggering weight around with an excess of fat, “existence” sounds utterly heavy. So much so that it makes you groan and wince. More so when it needs an abundant adverb, a labored string of words, to fully describe what it’s all about: “hand to mouth.”

Who cares if you are an optimist? Even if there’s a smiley sticker on your forehead to bang against the ax of any grim-faced existentialist, there are questions that simply compel you to scratch and scour for dandruffs deep into your skull.

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How, for instance, do you solve a problem like poverty?

In our classroom debate about socialized health-care, the disquiet segued into another scorching topic that belched smoke out of the ears of my professor in American Government and Politics. She minced no words against the destitute who simply depends on government dole-outs at the expense of taxpayers. Why should I pay hard-earned money for the lazybones, she puffed.

“My grandmother did not receive welfare,” said my professor, citing her old woman who sweated herself to a squeeze and singlehandedly sent four sons to school, one of them eventually becoming a billionaire. Toiling their butts off, she stressed, until they all crawled out of their “hand-to-mouth existence.” They don’t have to stick their snouts in the mud in the manner of pigs waiting to slurp on their slops.

Take matters in your hands. Grovel not for government, and don’t wait to ride piggyback on the politicians. They got their own time full and their own fingers sticking deep into people’s pockets, after all.

Go figure an estimated $100 billion straight to the sewers, as documented by Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) whose advocacy goes against drain of pork-barrel spending. That’s how CAGW describes the appropriation of money for a project even as it snorts against proper budgetary procedures.

Though Obama’s presidency trumpets the time for change, some politicians in CAGW’s spyglass look like they are out to continue the “long-honored Washington tradition.”

Same is true in the Philippines where pork is flabby with fancy names—the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) and Countryside Development Fund. Pigs may fly, but the sky is the limit as well for them who claw and bite their way into becoming senators and congressmen. And it’s not rocket science to know why.

“Junk the pork,” the title of an article in the Philippine Daily Inquirer last year, revealed: “This year each of the 214 congressmen is allocated 60 million pesos for spending at his discretion, and each of the 24 senators receives twice that amount.”

Because there’s no throwing accountability to PDAF like pearls to swine, contract irregularities become a shining example of graft and corruption. What congressman Herminio Teves revealed early this year came like a foregone conclusion: “Most of the PDAF is not properly used." Last we looked, the needs of the poor continued to yawn as traces of the P13.5 billion in pork barrel in the 2008 national budget ended up like a dream, a hazy abstraction.

In the face of poverty, the abolition of pork has been a constant cry. In Cebu recently, a group calling itself the Golden Movement has enlisted Cardinal Vidal’s support in their campaign to end the “mother of all corruption.” It would be a golden opportunity as well to raise this up front to any Congress-bound bets in the coming election, and see if they wouldn’t burn in the fat of their promises about alleviating poverty.

They would be lawmakers, yes. But as English barrister and writer, John Mortimer once averred: “No brilliance is required in law, just common sense and relatively clean fingernails.”

(geemyko@gmail.com)