Martial Law and that Joker experiment

It has been a year since Martial Law in Mindanao was declared. There’s this feeling I had like we are like in that boat scene in the movie The Dark Knight.

Let us wind back our clocks to that scene. Two boats were ferrying people out of Gotham as bombs and killings set off by the Joker gripped the city in fear. One boat carried civilians, the other carried prisoners who had to be secured from creating more chaos to the situation.

But the Joker set another trap. Hacking into the boats’ sound system, he announced he rigged the boat with bombs, but he switched the detonators to the opposing boats. Now the test is, who gets to blow off the other boat first: the civilians who fear for their lives, or the criminals who long for escape.

A tense debate began inside the boat with the civilians. No one wanted to pull the switch, although they know they had to protect themselves. Let’s do it, one passenger said. The prisoners deserve to die anyway because of their crimes, he justified.

One man stood up and said, Alright, no one wants to get their hands dirty, let me do it. But when he puts his hand on the switch, he pauses. He doesn’t pull off the switch, but instead puts it away and sank back to his chair, as all the other passengers sighed.

What happened to the other boat? One prisoner simply picked up the detonator and threw it out of the boat, resigning his fate to whatever actions will take place.

That scene, and that whole movie, is a reflection of how society reacts to terror, and how one person or a state taking extreme measures have dire consequence to the civilians.

That scene and those dialogues reminds of we have went through for a year. We debated, we become divided. Some said the actions of the state was necessary. People need to be punished for their actions. But some argued, is this really necessary? Do we understand what we are afraid of? Can we live with the consequence of such actions?

It seems we have this sense that the state we are in is okay. But we have only looked at our own boat, which has divided us from the “other”. Do we see the Meranaws who took no part in that terror, who lost their homes, their families and their own sense of security? Do we also see others, like the Lumads, whose sense of security is to protect their ancestral lands and their schools, yet the president threatened to put plantations or bomb their schools.

Fear is a basic state of mind. Another Dark Knight villain said, “We fear what we don’t understand.” So a joker could toy with our fears that could cloud our thoughts and our eyes from knowing what is real. And when I say real, I mean the real problems to our society.

Somehow, this test is still waiting for our answer. Do we understand what is happening? Do we know the “other”? Do we allow fear to trigger us or do we try to rationalize it? It’s been a year, and yet have we seen where this boat or this state is heading?