Dear Rowena Guanzon

By Noel Galon de Leon

“Kasalanan ko bang ipinanganak akong hindi mahirap?” sounds harmless if you are sitting comfortably, distant from hunger, eviction, and the daily mathematics of survival. But coming from someone with public influence, power, and visibility, that sentence is not innocent. It is arrogant in its misplaced self-defense. The problem is not that you were born comfortable. The problem is that you speak as if comfort exists in a vacuum, as if poverty is simply misfortune and not the predictable consequence of political neglect and elite capture. That tone, defensive, dismissive, self-centering, is what makes the statement morally ugly.

This is not about blaming someone for their birth. It is about condemning the entitlement embedded in the question. Only someone who has never had to choose between medicine and food would even frame the issue this way. The poor are not asking you to feel guilty for your family’s status. They are asking you to stop pretending that privilege is neutral when it is clearly built on a system that abandons them every single day. When you ask whether it’s your “fault,” you shift attention away from systemic injustice and back toward your fragile sense of innocence.

There is something deeply insulting about invoking personal innocence in a nation where children go to school hungry, where families sleep under bridges, where workers collapse from exhaustion after twelve-hour shifts for wages that cannot buy basic dignity. The statement does not just lack empathy. It actively erases the lived brutality of poverty by reducing everything to a question about your feelings and your comfort. That is not just tone-deaf. That is class arrogance polished to look like common sense.

The poor do not wake up asking, “Is it anyone’s fault that I am poor?” They wake up asking, “How do I survive today?” That is the asymmetry of power and pain that your statement ignores. You had the luxury to philosophize about blame because the system has never aimed its violence in your direction. Your question betrays distance, not just physical, but moral, from the lives of those who were not “lucky” enough to be born into safety.

A truly self-aware person would not ask whether they are to blame for being born comfortable. They would ask why millions are condemned to inherited misery in the first place. But that would require intellectual honesty and class consciousness, things that your statement carefully avoids. Instead of interrogating power, you defended your position inside it. That is why the comment feels less like an innocent musing and more like an instinctive shielding of privilege.

The hard truth is this. No one is accusing you of choosing your birth. People are criticizing you for choosing complacency. The poor do not need your guilt. They need your solidarity, your humility, and your willingness to speak about injustice without centering yourself as a victim of moral criticism. When you asked that question, you did not sound attacked. You sounded threatened by the possibility that comfort comes with responsibility.

Social inequality is not a natural disaster. It is a political design. Entire families are trapped for generations not because they lack effort, but because they lack access to education, healthcare, security, and dignity. Statements like yours rest comfortably on the myth that life outcomes are detached from structures. They are not. Pretending they are is one of the quiet ways elites protect their moral image while doing nothing to disrupt injustice.

There is an almost insulting softness in how you framed yourself, as if you were the one being judged, as if the real injustice were the discomfort of being morally questioned. Meanwhile, the poor are judged every day just for existing. They are labeled lazy, irresponsible, uneducated, unworthy. You were not challenged for being privileged. You were challenged for refusing to understand what that privilege means in a country built on inequality.

A person who truly respects the poor would not feel the need to defend themselves with a question like that. They would simply acknowledge the imbalance and speak with humility. Your statement, instead, was defensive, brittle, and emotionally self-protective. It was a performance of innocence, not an expression of empathy. And that performance always looks ugly when viewed from the perspective of those who have never been allowed the luxury of innocence.

The harsh reality is that you can be born comfortable and still be morally serious. But your words showed you are more invested in protecting your image than interrogating the system that protects your class. That is not an accident. That is ideology. It is the soft ideology of the comfortable, the kind that smiles in public but clenches its fists when confronted with the poor demanding structural change instead of charity.

This is why the statement deserves condemnation. Not because comfort is a sin, but because indifference disguised as innocence is. You do not need to apologize for existing. You need to stop talking as if your comfort is disconnected from the suffering around you. You need to stop turning systemic criticism into a personal defense case. The poor are not your prosecutors. They are the evidence of a broken system you refuse to fully confront.

People who grow up marginalized do not even have the privilege of asking philosophical questions about blame. They are blamed from birth for being poor, for being uneducated, for living in informal settlements, for surviving in ways that make the comfortable uncomfortable. Your question sounds especially hollow in that context. It is the voice of someone who has never had to justify their right to exist with dignity.

If anything, your statement exposed how deep the emotional gap is between the privileged and the struggling. You spoke as if life had simply dealt different cards, as if poverty were random. It is not random. It is designed, reinforced, normalized, and protected by people who benefit from it, including those who insist they are innocent because they did not “choose” their circumstances.

This is not about hating the rich. This is about defending the poor from being erased by pretty language and moral dodging. When you asked if it was your fault, you centered yourself. You made your comfort the emotional core of the discussion. And that, in a country full of desperate lives, is not just insensitive. It is insulting. It is the kind of softness that only exists because you have never felt real economic violence.

So no, it is not your fault that you were born comfortable. But it is absolutely your fault when you choose self-defense over solidarity, innocence over awareness, comfort over courage. Until you learn to speak with humility instead of entitlement, your words will continue to sound exactly what they are. The voice of someone protected by a system they refuse to fully see, while millions of Filipinos continue to suffer under it in silence.