Slippery slope

HE SAID he could be wrong about his list. I wonder if people realize that this cuts two ways. President Rodrigo Duterte could be wrong in that some officials should really not be in the list. But he could also be wrong in that some officials who should be in the list are not in it.

Either way, the drug scene is grimmer still because of the criminal involvement of corrupt officials. By the looks of it, Ateneo de Davao’s Fr. Joel Tabora, SJ could be right to predict that if Duterte failed in his war against drug traffickers and narco-officials the deadly drug trade will grow until no government can stop it ever.

Dominating the grim scenery are the killings that Sen. Leila de Lima claims to be “going out of hand” and Catholic Bishps Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) president Archbishop Socrates Villegas grieves over as “too much to swallow.” However, it must be said here that the first to go out of hand and to become too much to swallow were the killings perpetrated by drug traffickers and their corrupt government official and police coddlers, the situation that forced Duterte’s hand to go to war against drugs.

Hence, I do not begrudge the senator and archbishop their moral duty to sound the alarm that the numbers of those killed are going through the roof. I begrudge that Senator de Lima as justice secretary did next to nothing and nothing more than a whimper of condemnation was heard from Archbishop Villegas when the killings and the resulting wholesale destruction of families by drug traffickers had first gone out of hand and became too much to swallow.

In World War II, Catholic chaplains blessed German and American soldiers before they went to battle. Both Catholic clergies disapproved of war but here they were siding with their respective soldier-killers along national and not moral lines. It goes to show that when war is a given moralizing gives way to deciding which would be the more practical side to be on.

All wars are governed by laws. Yet it is a fact that the side of the good has a harder time winning than the side of the bad. The former is stymied by laws that it tries to respect. The latter cuts through any law that gets in the way. It all boils down to deciding which side to support because its violence is the lesser evil.

Another way to resolve this is to talk destiny. President Duterte believes that his “miraculous” election has put him on the road to his destiny of liberating the Philippines from narco-politics. But for some time now, drug traffickers and corrupt officials have been on the road to their greed’s destiny of taking over control of the country.

We can go down the slippery moral slope of deciding that Duterte’s destiny is best for the country or play safe by fence-sitting or armchair moralizing.