Kian delos Santos did not wish to be a corpse immortalized on Twitter. He did not wish for policemen to plant a .45 cal pistol on him. He didn’t envision pulling the trigger, running for his life, or getting gunned down. He never wished to confront policemen in his boxers.
Fate presented him with two choices: his life, or online immortality. I presume he would have chosen the former every single time.
Cruel fate dictated the latter. But now he lives forever, another name in our nation’s ideological struggle for moral ascendancy.
To tokhang or not to tokhang? To drug war or not to drug war? To protest or to be seen as weak and complacent? All very striking binaries.
I want to say that Kian delos Santos was more than just this binary symbol. Therein lies my discomfort with our treatment of him. He was a high school student and a son. He had neighbors and a solid group of friends. He did homework. He took math tests. He filled his room with candies and enjoyed rapping along to Fliptop battles. He got up early to help his father man his family’s sari-sari store. He ended his nights late to close it.
He seemed an awful lot like my younger brother and his friends. They have surely turned in similar homework assignments. The only thing that separates them from Kian is this: He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Conflicts are similar this way. They are both incomprehensibly Byzantine, and really simple. They are complex due to the political machinations and ethical debates that blur lines between enemy and ally, simple due to the fact that lives are unjustly lost on both sides of the debate regardless.
And this overlooked cost of human life—whether that be Kian’s, or a good policeman’s, or some truly aggressive drug
addict’s snuffed out in a police raid—should be what spurs us to unite rather than be divided.
Kian’s death, before spurring us toward ideological battlegrounds, ought to force us all to reckon with our own mortalities. To show us that if a good, law-abiding, 17-year-old kid could get himself extrajudicially killed despite doing nothing wrong, then so can the Duterte supporter working late nights at a call center. So can an off-duty Liberal-Party-supporting traffic enforcer, or a coddled, politically apathetic weed-smoking banking executive. So can the clubfooted son of an OFW. So can my younger brother. So can I, only three years older than Kian myself.
To reduce him to yet another casualty, like many of us have, in this so-called battle of good and evil, is to be no better than the policemen who gunned him down. If we are truly to remember him, I pray we remember him in full. I pray we celebrate his life as much as we mourn his death. He deserves that much. We, in our struggle to find an end to all this unjust violence, deserve that much, too. Show others that this conflict against which we struggle is grayer than we could ever imagine. The same goes for the many others we continue to mourn as this war’s casualties.
Flesh them out. Read their stories. Draw parallels between their lives and ours. Do not just use them as talismans for some greater movement. The more we realize and do this, the more these conflicts cease to be purely abstract political issues. The more they cease to be abstract, they finally strike us for what they are: wrongs that need to be stopped, regardless of what side of the political debate we stand on.
We after all, as humans, are never meant to be just means to an end. We lose sight of that often, whether protesting or supporting drug wars. We frequently forget to look past the statistics of those killed, or those likely to perish. We, instead of using their deaths to further examine ourselves and our actions, use them as a means to justify what we believe in. In the process, we forget to mourn.
Beyond moral outrage, let Kian’s unthinkable death return us to empathy.
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Jedd Ong, 20, is a student at the University of the Philippines College of Business Administration.