Compassion before guts

I was walking to work when I met the intrusive gaze of a stranger. He was wearing clothes twice the size of his body but no fabric could hide how his cheeks had sunk deep on his face. He was limping on the sidewalk with a backpack, like someone carrying his cross.

The man spoke to me. I heard how his words tangled with his tongue and emerged from his lips in a mumble. I had to ask him what he said thrice before finally realizing that it was a greeting.

Strangers come at me from every corner, yet never did it occur to me that a random drug addict would come my way and ask to chat. I was terrified. But instead of hurrying ahead, I felt an irrational impulse to listen to the man. In between our steps I came to know about his struggle.

His name was Jojo. He spent 10 years of his life hopping from one jail to the next before being granted parole. Tasting freedom, he decided to move on with his life outside Manila City Jail. Here are some details of his story: that his wife died some years ago, leaving him with a daughter and two sons; that his daughter was confined in hospital the previous night; that he was given the choice to change, and so he chose to stay alive for what life has left for him.

My conversation with Jojo was short. We parted at the intersection: I had to cross the street on South Avenue, and he had to turn right. He gestured for a high five. His fingers were grimy and callused, but that didn’t stop me from obliging. It was my way of thanking him for the five minutes that he shared with me his narrative of struggle—and still found reason to smile.

In our society, Jojo is known by many names: “junkie,” “outcast,” “dregs of humanity,” “stoner,” whatever. There is a big number of junkies in this country and they are the prey in the war on drugs. But if you ask me, some of them — let’s call them the Recyclables — are still lucky. The Recyclables, including Jojo, are drug users and pushers who are given a choice to piece their individual life back together, and find themselves on the way to becoming whole again. Jojo found his absolution by becoming a driver.

But here’s the thing: Not all junkies end up in the recycle bin. There are the Reusables who ceaselessly come back to their old niche either as pusher or user. They had been given a choice, too, but wasted it big time for whatever reason.

Apart fom the Recyclables and the Reusables, there are the Reduced, the throwaways. This is where the war on drugs gets muddled, for not all the Reduced are part of the drug trade. Most of them are marked by bullet wounds or stab wounds. They don’t go to the recycle bin; they go straight to the graveyard, six feet under. Some get dumped in some dark alley or thrown into a creek like real junk, for shame. But whether they were really involved in the drug trade, there is no certainty. In this age of “Tokhang,” one could very well use the word “Nanlaban” on somebody’s headstone. Do not forget the question mark — Nanlaban? — because that’s how their questionable death will be remembered.

Did the police listen to Kian delos Santos before they shot him in the head? Did the men who killed Carl Arnaiz even bother to ask why — or if — he committed his supposed crime? Or have the authorities been so absorbed by their tapang in pulling the trigger that they forgot they were about to steal somebody else’s life? These boys could have spent 50 years more in their lifetime — but hey, the police decreed their end at 17 and 19.

Existentialist philosophers have warned us that life coexists with suffering. And to live, one has to make sense of the pain that inevitably comes with survival. Does pain then still make sense for the Reduced? Were they killed just because it’s much easier to throw them out of the recycle bin than to keep them in? Is that it? For the sake of this social cleansing, are we willing to spill blood to clean up the drug mess?

There are no winners in this war, but the spike in the death toll will tell you who lost. That is how the game plan works, and it’s upon us to apprehend the irony and live with it.

Filipinos’ tapang has grown stronger in the war on drugs, apparently, but what happened now to malasakit ? Have we forgotten?

When then Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte ran in the presidential election in 2016, he trended on social media with the slogan “Tapang at Malasakit” (roughly, guts and compassion). Many Filipinos embraced him for his professed gutsy yet compassionate approach to social change, and he made the fist the symbol of his campaign. That fist won him the presidency.

And here comes change, and it has turned bloody. Is there any chance that we could reverse the slogan to “Malasakit at Tapang”? Before anyone pulls the trigger, wouldn’t it be better to first listen to the suffering people and sympathize with them, to first glimpse the human in them? What if the mouth does the talking and not the gun? To say “Come and tell me your troubles” instead of “Run for your life (Bang!)”?

The Philippines won’t magically turn into a version of Neill Blomkamp’s “Elysium” after the last drug user has been slain. Jojo and the millions of his kind deserve to live, too. They might have yielded to drugs’ lethal embrace, but that doesn’t mean they are beyond redemption. If our country wants to do social cleansing, we should do it by treating others as kapwa, as one’s own. By acknowledging the “self,” being one with the “other” in suffering, in joy, in pain, and in all the dynamics of human life.

The failure of compassion is the real war.

In school, I was taught that the heart is the size of a fist. It was easy to remember it that way. But in our society now, I hope Filipinos remember it this way: that the heart guides the fist by putting malasakit before tapang—by surrendering first to compassion before guts.

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Christele Jao Amoyan, 22, is a development communication graduate of the University of the Philippines Los Baños and works as an editorial production assistant at the Inquirer.