Any war will come at a price

Like the best of artisanal wines, our President just doesn’t travel well. Best consumed at home, in familiar and intraculturated  surroundings.

Filipinos understand his raw, unvarnished, vintage love for this country. In the vernacular, he is as lyrical about its beauty as he is livid about its ugliness. In fact, he is quite passionate about the Philippines!

Since he was swept to the presidency by an overwhelming vote less than 100 days ago, he has been unrelenting in his primary commitment to his constituents: to make this a drug-free country. Not to mount an alertness campaign. Not to effect a local reform or two. Not to slap the hand of those who might play a  part in this drama. To have a completely  Drug-Free Country.

Any take-no-prisoners war, but especially a war on drugs, will come at a price.

Who was not shocked at the sight of the slain bodies of alleged druggies so gruesomely pictured in our broadsheets?

Wives and mothers, cradling their husbands, brothers and sons like inconsolable Pietas.

But where are the pictures of the countless Filipino families waking the cold bodies of their children, slain by drug overdose?

As the President wages this war, were you as surprised as I to see more than 800,000 drug users or drug pushers come out of the shadows to voluntarily turn themselves in? Afraid to be collateral damage to either side, they are throwing themselves at the mercy of the law.

And here’s where we fail. No place to put them, to help them, to rehabilitate them.

Last Sept. 2, a man put a bomb under a chair in a place filled with fellow men and women, enjoying an evening at a night market, and then scurried away like a filthy sewage rat—not even brave enough to strap that bomb to himself to die with honor.

You think this was a “human” with any sense of “humanity” in him?

On Sept 4, John Nery penned a column (“‘Are they human?’ is a dangerous doctrine”) questioning the position of Fr. Joel Tabora, SJ, on the President’s position. I, too, have enormous respect, not only for you, but also for
Father Tabora, who just happens to also be my kid brother.

I would like to suggest that Twitter is not a good vehicle for my brother, who normally is so precise he likes to use the long form of a theological tract, like St. Augustine, to make the simplest of statements. So when he gets hemmed in by the 184-character limitation of a tweet, it may really not be enough for him to say it right.

But I am suggesting that if you were to use “human” to refer to our species and “humanity” to reference our obligation to one another, the whole thing takes on a different and less bewildering aspect.

I am suggesting that you, Father Joel, the President and I are actually on the same page:

Drugs make our fellow humans do inhumane things to one another. To return to our dignity as children of God, we must eradicate the root cause of so much inhumanity. We must join Duterte’s war on drugs.

—CRISTINA TABORA,marketing and project development,
Tabora Communications,[email protected]