The Killings Have to Stop
In light of the recent senate hearings, I'm reposting this essay I wrote in 2017 to remind myself how horrible and angry I felt. And more importantly, how horrible and angry I should still feel.
In light of the recent Senate Blue Ribbon Committee hearings, I'm reposting this essay I wrote in 2017 after the death of Kian delos Santos, a 17-year-old fatally shot by police officers during an anti-drug operation. I write to remind myself how horrible and angry I felt. And more importantly, how horrible and angry I should still feel.
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The killings have to stop. This has gone way too far.
Perhaps my initial restraint to write about this came from disbelief. Ever since these massacres began, I refused to believe that this is what our country has become. I refused to accept this culture of murder, this daily slaughter of the innocent, this state-sanctioned bloodbath. But not even rose-tinted glasses can hide all the blood on the streets.
Men and women perish. Children are gone way too soon. Funerals are everywhere—if they even have a funeral. We are left with mothers without children, children without parents, husbands without wives. No one is spared except the murderers themselves. Young or old. Male or female. Employed or unemployed. Innocent or guilty. It doesn’t matter anymore. With all this disregard for due process, you will always be guilty.
It’s like innocent isn’t even a word in this country. Innocence is instead called ‘collateral damage’ or “Adik yan, ‘wag tularan.” People are left defenseless, unable to explain themselves, and left to the (lack of) mercy of their oppressors. Frankly, it doesn’t even solve anything. Guns are shot indiscriminately, with no assurance that these lifeless bodies were the criminals they were after in the first place.
Even if these people were guilty, even if they were involved in drugs somehow, no one deserves to die that way, as if they were pigs for slaughter. Without due process. They become stripped of the inalienable rights promised to them as Filipinos, even if it’s in the goddamn constitution.
When murder becomes as normal as the taho vendor you see in the morning, then something certainly is amiss.
Some people believe that all that matters is that they’re safe, untouched, and uninvolved. I don’t know about them, but there’s no way in hell I feel safe. The way these murders are going, the next death could easily be anyone. It could be someone we know. It could even be you or me. I think of all the nights when medical interns have to walk home late from duty, white pants bloodstained from venipunctures. What becomes of us in the middle of the night? Is my thermometer suddenly a gun? Is my stethoscope a deadly weapon? And when I defend myself, is that reason enough to say “nanlaban ako?”
All this war creates is fear. Fear of an administration that kills and doesn’t care. That gives the go signal for all this bloodshed. That smiles on its blind supporters and assassins. “This isn’t freedom. This is fear,” I remember Captain America saying. Fear is what kept Hitler in power. And we all know how that turned out.
Let this be a battle cry. I echo the laments of everyone who cannot accept this culture, who cannot just swallow it all and move on. I possess no power to change anything, but I can continue to be angry, and maybe that’s power enough. I continue to care about the lives gone too soon. I continue to condemn this war and the damage it cannot undo. These murders cannot be and will never be okay. They should never be reduced to a “Gano’n talaga” or a “Kasalanan naman nila”.
They say this is a war that must be fought to win our safety, but Neville Chamberlain begs to disagree: “In war, whichever side may call itself victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.” We are losing—losing lives, losing trust, losing hope, and losing faith in our own country. This war has to stop.
This isn’t a teacher punishing a student for being bad; this is a monster destroying everything that stands in its way. I never imagined I would ever have to argue that murder is diabolic, something even children should know. It turns out even these children perish in the crossfire.
This is the dystopia we don’t want to become. This has to stop.
The. Killings. Have. To. Stop.
—
After seven years from Kian’s death, I listen to Duterte speak in the Senate with no remorse whatsoever. I listen to him be his arrogant and obnoxious self, in the same manner he was during his term. And I hear people applaud. I see people agreeing and even defending him. The only question I have is how: how did we let this happen? How do we continue to stand behind murder?
How do we listen to this hearing with anything but disgust and anger?
Paano natin to nasisikmura, Pilipinas?
