Siftings
From gray to black
As I write this piece, trying to finish the literary reminiscences which I started last month in trying to make a clearing of peace around me as I mentally strolled in the gardens of memory, my pen halts in mid-sentence. A line from the column article of Gail Ilagan before me arrests my eyes, and the combined shock and horror and pain sweep over me so overwhelmingly that tears come rushing down my face unbidden, releasing the feelings I had been harboring and keeping down in my heart in these past weeks. As I read Gails’ piece – so beautifully and clearly written from the heart and soul of a beautiful writer, although I have never met her – the tears just keep coming.
In sympathy for the bereaved. In a mix of horror and pity for the victims who never dreamed they would die in such heretofore unheard of and unspeakable brutality, bestial atrocity upon atrocity.
What was it like, being tortured, raped as the women reporters were, and according to Gail, “shot between the legs before they were shot in the brain?” I heard from my son that the members of the convoy accompanying the Mangudadatus were probably beaten and clubbed even while they were still in the vehicles, and shot repeatedly while they attempted to run. Innocent bystanders at the tail of the convoy who happened to be there at the wrong time were shot mercilessly, without rhyme or reason. Under a bright sunny sky ordinarily blessed by the beneficence of God.
But God was not present that day of November 23, 2009. Satan was in complete possession of the hearts and souls of those murderers, driving them to acts of bestiality that boggles the minds of decent people. And make me wonder how the unscrupulous, the arrogant, the power-mad can become so monstrous, with or without the influence of drugs, as to commit acts we call bestial, when beasts such as the shark, the tiger, the lion, etc. only kill when they are hungry or when angry due to human acts, but can retaliate only with directness, without the calculated malice and evil that make the Ampatuan massacre stand out in inhumanity.
When it happened, I was on a trip to Manila doing personal chores for the family. Initial reports made everyone gasp with shock and horror at the circumstances and the number of victims. But as the excavations of bodies proceeded, I shunned reading the papers, afraid to read details that world only horrify me some more.
But snippets of the horrendous details keep surfacing and niggling me, driving me to read columns and views and absorb the horror and shock of people here and abroad.
And now it comes to me that our lives as a people and a country will be changed due to November 23. Like that other human-made calamity, the 911 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and their consequent waste of thousands of lives, this Massacre of innocents will have to be confronted with more than military weapons.
This is a terrorist act of immense proportions carried out by a political family with overweening ambition and greed, made possible by weak laws such as the ban on political dynasties which cannot be implemented due to the number of politicians who voted against it. Made even more possible by an alliance with the present administration which has closed its eyes to the presence of private armies and warlords and strong men. An administration that leads by its bad example.
We need more than weapons fort this enormity. We need the weapons of Wisdom, Love of Freedom and Justice and Peace, Largeness of Heart and Spirit, Commitment to God and the Good.
But how? I really do not know. Maybe we citizens of this country and of the rest of the world, should come together and talk, plan, commit, on how to save this world and our Humanity, endangered from future annihilation by such enormities. The most telling enormity is the way women were treated in this massacre. Is this a display of Muslim Machismo against liberated women such as women journalists, venting its wrath by shooting the journalists in the seat of their womanhood and then in their brains, the source of their intelligent pursuit of human freedoms?
November 23, 2009 is not a gray day in my soul. It will forever be a Black Day. For this nation and for the world.
It is a Black Day for women, for journalists and the media in general. And for Muslims.
From that day onward, women will no longer feel safe anywhere because the time-honored respect and consideration accorded them no longer works. Nor would a press card guarantee the safety of journalists, male or female, all over the world. Certain new precautions, standards of behavior and protocol, will now have to be set up for the protection of this profession, the only one ideally conceived to commit itself to the active pursuit of Truth in the service of Freedom, Justice, Peace and all the Desiderata that make human life livable and worthwhile. And from that day onward, the Muslims will be held accountable in the gaze of the world for one more atrocity in the name of Terrorism.
What is it about Islam that makes some of its followers strike dread in the hearts of those who cross their paths? But the Muslims as a people are human. They feel, they think. They strive for the same ideals Christians have died for. They bleed, they die. Their god Allah is a merciful god, and Mohammed his Prophet is the Compassionate One. Innocent Muslims do not deserve the name of Evil Incarnate.
Years from now, when we can look back on this black day with a measure of equanimity, we will recognize its significance for us with immeasurable sadness and regret: for it has forever rendered limitless the horrible possibilities of political violence.
For now, universal Humanity is mute, tied to a stake and held capture for Ransom.
