Antigone and the cruelest of lies

Reading Cielito F. Habito’s “The trouble with lawyers” (Opinion, 2/3/17), I was half-expecting that somewhere along the way, he would quote Shakespeare’s “first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” He didn’t; he must have correctly understood that it was said in praise, not in dispraise, of the legal profession.

In “Henry VI,” Dick the Butcher so told coplotter Jack Cade, in their plot to take power. Had Ferdinand Marcos read and agreed with the Bard, he might have, early on, eliminated the Tañadas, Dioknos, Salongas, Padillas, Arroyos and all the other lawyers who did not let the ramparts fall without any struggle in 1972. The German lawyers did, when Hitler became numero uno in a perfectly constitutional manner. They obeyed as law anything calling itself by that name and printed as such at government expense. They did not raise the foolish questions of the day.

Today, I see US Attorney General Sally Yates fired by a fascistic, so-called US President Donald Trump, as a modern Antigone. Both Yates and Antigone refused to surrender their conscience to a state. So did Seattle District Judge James Robart and the three judges (not justices) of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

President Duterte should raise the morale of our TNT (tago ng tago or undocumented) kababayan immigrants in America, who are affected by Trump’s controversial immigration order, if only for humane, hardship reasons, instead of needlessly coming out in support of Trump’s travel ban.

Mr. Duterte talks too much. Meanwhile many of our lawyers talk too little, or not at all, proving that the cruelest of lies are often told in silence, as Robert Louis Stevenson might have said.

R.A.V. SAGUISAG, Palanan, Makati City