Precipice

One thing is very clear. The recent spate of killings is very alarming. One thing that is not as clear is who to blame. To be sure, President Duterte has to take a portion of the blame. As leader of the country, it comes with the job to take credit, or blame, for anything that happens in that country.

But to say that Duterte may have inspired the killings with his tough talk and is therefore solely to blame is to take the narrative to a whole new level of malice and deceit. It may be conceded that Duterte may have pushed things over the precipice but it took a whole variety of circumstances to bring those things close enough to the precipice to be pushed.

In other words it is totally unfair to blame Duterte alone for the push and not take to account those who brought this country close to the edge. The way to the precipice took a very long time in coming. It took a very long and agonizing series of steps for this country to get to a position where it virtually took very little effort or provocation to push over.

To find the other part of the blame, let us take stock of ourselves and our environment and how, in their interaction over the decades, produced a country that embraced a culture of violence so willingly. Have we not, for example, allowed ourselves to be immersed in violence even in the way we entertain ourselves?

In the 1960s, the environment in which I grew up and of which I can speak with some degree of authority, killings were largely unheard of. In my hometown of Mandaue City, a person gets beaten up and it is such a big deal the story stays for a whole month with the community.

Not anymore. The whole country, nay, the whole world has been swallowed up by a humongous failure of the human race to make the proper distinction between right and wrong, between good and evil. Yes, Duterte saying God is stupid was offensive to any Godfearing person, regardless of which religious context he made his assertion. But why did he say it?

The problem is, nobody bothered to listen to the rest of the Duterte message, much less tried to understand it. The words that sprung from his mouth leaped out from a horrible thing that happened to him as a child in the hands of religious shepherds who never got punished or atoned for their sins.

Many of these same shepherds are still at it today, rich, powerful, and influential. They take on Duterte for his sins, forgetting that quarreling with a sinner is not the way to bring him over. They have forgotten humility. They want to prove Duterte wrong. They want to win. That is not the way of shepherds. God did not send Jesus to quarrel with sinners but to love and save them.

‘The problem is, nobody bothered to listen to the rest of the Duterte message, much less tried to understand it.’