ONCE again, at the regularly-scheduled six-month interval, we return to the city’s latest session of Endurance Mode Limbo, available as downloadable content now for only a small, nominal fee of being a sidewalk stall-vendor.
What I mean by this is that it is once again the bi-annual extension of the legal limbo void-state that the city’s central business district newsstands and stall-owning vendors exist in.
A refresher: nearly three full years ago in 2021, the government issued an order that in summary stated that these people selling newspapers on the sidewalks had to no longer be on the sidewalks. Where to? No clue, just not there.
Naturally, this is not a very fair sudden edict to impose on short notice to people who generally cannot afford to pack up and leave and go on a two-year backpacking journey cross-country to find themselves with nothing but a high-definition camera, a pack of clothes, and a parachute of several hundred thousand pesos of safety money. There was much outcry and outrage – for a short period of time anyway, but barely enough to get a response.
In response to so much outcry, local lawmakers declared that This Is Unacceptable! and subsequently did the bare minimum of agreeing to not push them out for now, just until we find a nice and snug box to put you in.
This is what I call the Origin of the Void, and the original plan was that the stall-owners would be given 3 (three) months only to stay in place until the government figured out where to plop them down into. A precarious limbo game, an existence in between states of “permitted” and “not permitted” – “employed” and “unemployed” – “scraping by” and “starving.” Thus, the Void. They have been entered into the Void where they are neither allowed nor removed, waiting for the day an outside impetus changes the unmoving, unchanging In Between.
Initial propositions ranged from “get building owners to give them some space inside” to “relocate them outside of central business” to “promote them to customer” and many plans were drawn up in these first three months. Plenty of plans were made. Consultations were held, stakeholders were politely listened to and nodded at, organizations made one-time declarations of support that were instrumental to the first agreements, and lo, the Void came into existence.
And so the First Void Era passed by uneventfully. Three months of uneventful planning of the eventual removal of this small handful of “problem children,” and that should have been it.
However, the Void would renew itself. After the first three months passed, the psychopomps had come for their charges. Death was here for the stalls (relocation, but in practice to move them out of that premium position was to essentially sign an economic execution). But then the cycle began. The stall-owners, the news media, the small but active population of concerned citizens awoke from their slumber to defy the death knell. And once again, the Void continued – they remained in that in-between, the state of neither.
Another six months would pass. And here, scribes, lore-keepers, and chroniclers, would note the forming of a tradition. Thus came to pass the first iteration of the twice-yearly Renewal of the Void in the form of a council-granted extension of the extension of the status quo.
Iterations would happen every half-year to follow, each time led by an increasingly smaller group to increasingly smaller fanfare. Thus the Void is sustained by the efforts of a few champions, a few heralds. This year, in the latest turning of the cycle, there was but one champion, and the procedure had become so ritual that the entire Renewal happened within the span of five minutes with a nonchalant council approving of the conduct of the rites.
Today, the Void has been renewed for another half-year. Yet again, there continues to be inaction from the Powers That Be, and these individuals once again exist in uncertainty. At this point, I imagine that far from the doubt and fear, the mental state for them is now along the lines of this is existence now – a quiet acceptance that the threat that at any point they may be removed has been dulled significantly by precedent and history and the complete lack of any action for the past three years, meaning that statistically they are entirely justified to think that they will simply go through the ritual of every six months renewing their “temporary” stay.
Is there a lesson or call to action to this? In the past iterations of the cycle, the past eras of the Void, we have always in this publication called for humane treatment and proper relocation and compensation for these people so that they no longer exist in the legal ether.
But I personally have changed my views. Three years may not always change the nature of a man, but it is a lot of time to turn a perspective half-circle. Now I think – perhaps the embrace of the Void isn’t so bad. Perhaps there is a certainty and a comfort to the discomforting uncertainty, once left long enough to sit.
Who knows? Maybe we can make a tourist attraction out of the bi-annual Renewal of the Void. A century from now, maybe a new champion will walk up to the council of that time to ask for another six-month extension. The meaning will have been lost. No one knows where this tradition came from, or what its value is, but thousands flock to witness it every year.
Newsstands do not exist and the citizens have no idea what the mythical term refers to – a fragment of a long-gone civilization, perhaps – but every six months, without fail, as surely as the pull of entropy pulls everything into the Void, the Void renews itself.