In fear and shock

It is that most dreaded knock on the door these days: the news that a family member has died, and in a terrible way—shot in the streets like a rabid dog. Worse, the unknown killers have defiled the body by adorning it with a crude cardboard sign branding the dead person a drug addict or pusher.

Dead people can’t protest, and so the tag will be murmured about, picked up and spread on the airwaves, and bandied about mindlessly by partisans on social media. The family in grief is lashed twice over—first by the brutal killing of a loved one, second by the cruel accusation that would never be proved or disproved.

But there is something even worse: having two family members die the same way. Three months ago, Lauren Rosales was shot in the head in a jeepney by an unknown killer. She was a young woman of 26 who was “most emphatically uninvolved in the drug trade, enjoying her career as an executive assistant at a leading food company, a job she took after working at a call center,” wrote columnist Butch Dalisay, an uncle of Lauren’s boyfriend.

Lauren’s brother Petronio came back from the United Kingdom to join the family in its grief, and decided to stay put for a while to help follow up the investigation of her murder. The other week, he, too, suffered his sister’s fate—shot in the street as he was waiting for a ride home.

The unspeakable injustice that befell the Rosales family has not roused a statement of indignation or commiseration from anyone in the government. Not from the Philippine National Police, whose basic duty it is to protect ordinary citizens from harm. Not from President Duterte, whose declaration of a war on drugs has led to an open season that appears to have emboldened criminals to litter the streets with corpses. And not from the esteemed rights champions of the Left who, apart from earlier statements calling for a stop to the wave of extrajudicial killings (but no denunciation of the administration with which it is now allied and which has enabled the bloodbath through its rhetoric and indifference), have not been heard from as the number of the murders mounts.

Families who have seen their lives shattered by the violence are in fear and shock. Imagine what the Rosaleses are enduring. “Our dear, hapless Lauren wasn’t the only collateral damage in this offensive—it’s every citizen’s peace of mind, that spasm that now seizes you when a stranger turns up at your door or on your rearview mirror with malice aforethought,” wrote Dalisay. And now even Lauren’s brother is dead.

Amid the killing and dying, Filipinos are coping in apparently the only way they know how: with humor. For the All Saints Day holidays, a mall thought up “appropriate” decor—a faux cadaver sprawled on the floor, the requisite cardboard sign by its side. It has come to this: Death has become so easy and so common it is now a joke, a visual gag in gleaming malls where families and children gather.

Or, as playwright Floy Quintos mournfully put it in a moving piece he posted on Facebook:

“I saw some souls the other night,/ moving sadly among masked revellers/ They did not delight in fistfuls of candy,/ or in good news from the distant shoals./ Their wails would not be silenced by the madness of the mob,/ or by the blaring promises of future glory./ They looked at me,/ and would not go away./ Not even when the parade of frantic pretender ghouls had passed.

“They did not ask much of me,/ these souls twice slain/ first by bullets,/ then by indifference.

“Asked the ghosts,/ Could I honor a memory/ of their dreams,/ or share regret for/ what they could have been?/ Would I call to them by name,/ and use no label?/ In the face of slander,/ would I mutter faint protest,/ a whispered aside,/ a break in the voice,/ a seething anger/ for all they had been denied?

“Not much, no?

“But I could not answer,/ for fear of the mob./ So, the poor things moved on/ increasing in number,/ but paler/ and fainter.”