“A blow, expected, repeated, falling upon a bruise.” In his novel “Brideshead Revisited,” Evelyn Waugh describes it well: “with no smart or shock of surprise, only a dull and sickening pain and the doubt whether another like it could be borne.” This is how it has felt to be a young person in the first year of the Duterte administration—to proceed from the haphazard optimism we all tried to feel at first, and to watch aghast as the administration has begun inch by inch to pull the rug out from underneath us.
At this point, anyone who denies the extrajudicial killings is just kidding themselves; we watch in rising horror as the numbers pile up and funerals become a part of daily life for us, as clearly depicted in a photo series of The New York Times from two days ago. As for truth in the media, itself a pliable thing, it has become an unreasonable expectation altogether, because who needs fact-checking when Mocha Uson and her ilk are here to teach us about true journalism? Also, it has become easier to stop listening to what the President says because someone is likely to make an official statement taking back whatever new sexist, offensive, or undiplomatic thing he’s said, anyway; his official “meaning” has to be gleaned through the expert interpretations of his spokespersons. Last week, in a ballroom dedicated to a conference for surgeons, I watched him steal the spotlight in his typical way, speaking at length about our sovereign nation and about the United States as traitor and cheat. In fact he was fairly noisy on a number of issues, but on the burial of the dictator Marcos he has in some ways remained curiously silent, with no attempt to appease the growing rage of a nation who was only just beginning to recover from martial law.
And then this week: the forced departure of VP Robredo from the Cabinet, as gauche as a scene from “Sex and the City” where Woman breaks up with Man via Post-it; and then the approval of a death penalty bill, as though we didn’t belong to a country where the sophistication of our criminal justice system is such that anyone so much as accused of pushing drugs can be jailed or, more likely, killed on the street with impunity.
This is the Philippines where we are expected to live—to go to work, to pay taxes, to raise children, staying out of the administration’s way, trying to teach our young (not to mention each other) that values like decency, politeness, gender sensitivity and respect for the intrinsic value of life are things that exist, even though our leaders have never seemed to show a lick of any of these. Each day a new blow falls upon a bruised national spirit, each new issue more divisive than the last. Our opinion columns could talk about other things for a change but it seems daunting to think of lighthearted, “millennial” concerns when the biggest concern facing millennials is this: that we live in a time where our institutions have failed us, and where the future has become more and more uncertain. Even the present falls into question, because are we really seeing what we are seeing? Are we really allowing all of this to happen, or have we fallen into some dystopian novel?
But surely, even in this time when the President’s words are riddles, where the truth is elusive, where guilt and innocence are changeable, surely there are absolutes. Surely punishment without due and thorough process is still an evil; surely mercy is important; surely kind, respectable, responsible statesmen are still to be desired. Surely there are things left to fight for.
I don’t write to exhort people into protest, because we are already (in our millennial way) doing this, noisily and annoyingly. I write only to record, for posterity, that we are raging against the so-called dying of the light; that we are angry; that, like the “brisk little somebody” of the Robert Browning poem—“critic and whippersnapper, in a rage to set things right”—we are trying our best not to fall into a deadened stupor just because our administration has deprived us of things to look forward to, and given us only things to dread.
kaychuarivera@yahoo.com