Want to hear another horror story?
Last week, we all voted in the barangay elections. On the morning of the polls, news started trickling in: people not being able to find their precincts, voters waiting for hours because their names were missing from master lists, the elderly climbing several floors to vote.
In my case, our election felt like a badly organized bazaar where no one knew what was being celebrated, or who was supposed to be in attendance.
My parents were assigned to a downstairs classroom, while I was asked to go to the second floor to look for my name. “If you can go upstairs, just go upstairs, too,” I heard one of the volunteers telling another senior citizen, “It looks like you can walk anyway.”
On the second floor, a volunteer saw me and asked for my last name.
“Ponce de Leon,” I replied.
“De Leon,” he responded.
“EXCUSE ME, THAT IS NOT MY LAST NAME,” I spun on my heel. (This pet peeve merits a whole other column, dedicated to those who dismiss it as mere inconvenience without thinking of the legal implications.)
I went to the third floor and finally got to vote. My parents, on the other hand, took another hour to finish, after being made to wait until their names were located on this or that master list, which had apparently either been wrongly printed or misplaced.
Well, this doesn’t sound like a horror story anymore, does it? It’s the same disaster election after election, an expected horror, a black fantasy become reality. Most people will say that it’s because we’ve never had the right infrastructure anyway: schools have always been built floors atop floors, they’re the only places to go to for voting (and evacuation, and relief, and vaccination …), we’re a congested city, we can’t be built horizontally.
But the question is: should we have to put up with this every year?
Yes, some of us can climb stairs, look through pages and pages for our names, or sit down in really hot classrooms to wait for our names to be located. But the question remains: should we?
For a right to be able to vote, to think clearly, to do something that marks our duties as citizens of a country, should we be made to go through inconveniences all in the name of, “Well, it’s always been this way?”There are two horror stories here, and they are horror stories duplicated across the world today in the general shroud of normalization.First: assumed normalization, or a resignation to the notion that things will never change. That the elections will always be inconvenient, that there will always be poor people struggling to survive, that any war will have collateral damage.
All these notions are insidious because they are outgrowths of mental laziness. Elections, poverty, and conflicts are all complicated problems with solutions that require an exercise of imagination. Resigning to assumed normalization absolves people of the responsibility to find solutions to complicated problems.
Second: enforced normalization, where those who want things to remain the same also enforce their mental laziness on those who point out shortcomings in or propose changes to a broken system.
Case in point: government officials who dismiss the opposition, even when the critiques are based on assessments of reality.
Or: the candidates who keep the poor needy and impoverished by Red-tagging those who question why the poor have to remain poor.
Plus: online warriors who paint all opposition to their views with the same brush, who brand calls for compassion with labels such as haters, demons, and anti-(insert ideology here)—even when people are being bombed out of their homes, even when children are dying, even when cities are flattened and wiped out.
The political philosopher Hannah Arendt once referenced the “banality of evil” when she covered Adolf Eichmann’s trial. Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust, had been branded a “monster.”
Arendt, however, steered clear of the label, because calling someone a monster also means that the person is wicked in essence, and clearly so. She sought to separate Eichmann from his actions.
Evil, she argued, is banal, and this ordinariness makes it horrifying. It means that anyone can commit evil, and they can do so with thoughtlessness—more precisely, when they act with no reflection, no compassion for others, no regard for the repercussions of their actions.
She called Eichmann “terribly and terrifyingly normal.”
Because that’s the true horror story. Normalization is no mere subscription to tradition, or reliance on stereotypes. It’s an everyday blindness to nuance, an unwillingness to imagine, an inability to think critically, an aversion to critique—and often, interpreting a critique of one’s actions as an attack on one’s identity.
It feels normal. But sometimes, to enforce normality is to draw attention away from the reality of lives sacrificed, to argue with mere semantics, to be complicit in evil.
The (horror is still happening, so this really has got to) End.
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iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu