Holy Innocents’ Day thoughts

I write this year-end column with the cadence of the soft drizzle of rain, and while the world outside is going crazy because Christmas Day is drawing near and so many people think they have to join the mad rush lest they be left behind, below or betwixt.

Tomorrow, Dec. 28, is Holy Innocents’ Day, in remembrance of the baby boys in Bethlehem—niños inocentes, as we refer to them in Spanish—slaughtered on orders of King Herod after hearing about the birth of Jesus. The paranoid Herod did not want to risk losing his grip on power to a newborn who had been prophesied to become king of the Jews. Power and paranoia is a book title in my mind.

“When Herod realized that the visitors from the East had tricked him, he was furious. He gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its neighborhood who were 2 years old and younger—this was done in accordance with what he had learned from the visitors about the time when the star had appeared.

“In this way what the prophet Jeremiah had said came true: ‘A sound is heard in Ramah, the sound of bitter weeping. Rachel is crying for her children; she refuses to be comforted for they are dead’” (Matthew 2:16-18).

It is not hard to find similarities in this century. In many places all over the world, innocent children—and their parents as well—are dying because of wars and strife without end; are being killed, if not directly by bombs and bullets, by hunger and disease. In the Philippines, in our present time, we have our own version repeated many times over, each a book, a movie unto itself.

Trauma journalist Patricia Evangelista’s groundbreaking “Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country” (Random House, 2023)—or SPNK—is hardly the book to read in this season of joy and reckless celebrations. But it is a book to read, even if only briefly, on the Feast of the Holy Innocents, for it to coincide with the Gospel reading of the day that should resonate with a present-day context.

Call it “spiritual reading,” if you may, in the midst of the din or in some hideaway in a forest clearing. Or continue reading SPNK another time when the heart is quiet enough to take in the horrendous violence recorded in the book, violence wrought upon innocents while many looked the other way.

I read the book from cover to cover, with frenzy and urgency because I had to be present in one of its numerous launchings, assigned by the Mother Prioress to pose questions to the author, and in my alma mater at that. I did after Evangelista finished delivering her bloodcurdling soliloquy on stage and transported the audience to the bloody scenes where she had been. These were the places where extrajudicial killings were carried out by government operatives and hired guns who heeded former president Rodrigo Duterte’s orders, places where blood and body bits were still fresh and the sound of weeping still hung in the air.

As the House of Representatives’ marathon hearings recently summarized, Duterte’s bloody war on drugs has turned out to be a smokescreen, a cover-up for a “grand criminal enterprise” that was worse than the drug-related crimes it meant to eradicate. What happens now to the innocent victims, the so-called collateral damage who fell—or were felled—by the wayside while the big fish were made to get away and the trigger-happy killers rewarded and congratulated by the former president?

These are some of the questions that continue to be asked again and again, stories heard again and again, like Herod’s murder of the innocents that continue to be told for more than two thousand years since it happened.

From SPNK: “Those of us who followed the dead could afford to bemoan, as Vincent did, the family’s inability to ‘see the big picture.’ It was easy to follow the parade of coffins and imagine these last two deaths as inevitabilities, the natural consequence of violent rhetoric from above and wholesale impunity below…

“I cannot, with any certainty, report the true toll of Rodrigo Duterte’s war against drugs. Numbers cannot describe the human cost of this war, or adequately measure what happens when individual liberty gives way to state brutality. Even the highest estimate—over 30,000 dead—is likely insufficient to the task.”

Another “kill” book is journalist Philip Lustre Jr.’s “Kill, Kill, Kill: Extrajudicial Killings in the Philippines Crimes Against Humanity” which just came out. The title must be words from the pathocrat himself whose middle name is “IWKY.” I have yet to find a copy but the blurbs from fellow journalists are enough to tell me that like SPNK, Lustre’s book needs to be read not just by Filipinos but by members of the International Criminal Court. Bring it on.

Despite the personal losses, griefs, and uncertainties that came with 2024, let us claim and own the joy of Christmas. I do.

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