On Wednesday last week, pictures of a mother wrapped in air-resistant PPE, head covered all over, eyes whose tears unable to drop, and a dead three-month-old baby, flooded the news. That mother was the urban poverty activist Reina Nasino, jailed from acting upon her rights to criticize what she deemed unjust and unfair in Philippine government practices. That three-month-old her baby River. And those handcuffs the material manifest of despotism that has plagued the country since 2016. Around her, the grieving crowd, and around them the men-in-uniform, camouflaged in a daylit-city setting, as if the detainee in question was Pablo Escobar. The scenery did not in any way suggest an instance of motherly grief. The scenery was tyranny itself.
Yet, we heard the news of the national dictator’s (the first one) wife freed due to compassion. The oldest and corrupt (ex-)senator the same. Another corrupt but younger the same too. Compassion was the term, but where did the word go when the dictionary was spawned to grant the idealist mother the furlough to grieve a deceased daughter? When did compassion start disappearing when the captive in question is not a TV-screened personality from the high tables? When a PNP chief could blow a party and still get promoted weeks later, but a mother could not even land her bare palms upon the coffin window of her daughter, we know there is something wrong. And this knowing is painful, even from an outsider’s point of view, because we also know in a larger picture it’s not merely a case. It’s a theme: tyranny, and we know it all too well. But it’s a knowing that does not dull the humanity still left in us. Because time and again, the despotic measures of the state beat its own record, and as if being in a sadomasochistic scheme we forcibly train our eyes to numb our sensitivity for compassion, until the atrocities that make us vomit 5 years back can only make us pull our eyelids down now, and sigh that what is, is. But no.
What happened to Nasino recently was for sure in the same line of harassment received by another activist, the murdered Randy Echanis, whose cadaver the police took 2 months ago to rot a little more, until they thought of returning it to the family. Shameless heartlessness. We live in a nation where sin is not anymore brushed under the rug, but blatantly paraded in daylight. When this is the case, we can cast doubt whether it’s still about the sin itself to these tyrants, and not the reaction it will spur from the public. Following the latter, the message is clear, and it has a particular audience: those who speak. You speak, and you will be condemned following the tragedies of Echanis and Nasino. They are made the medium for an implicit message from the state—a collective death threat. Is it something new? The Philippine’s highest government official has proven time and again that it’s not.
But then, we realize that, oh, we are in the Anti-Terrorism Law era after all. No surprise. But the mere fact that fear should still be imposed is in itself an indication that the fear-imposer is fearful himself. He fears the absence of fear. This is why he tries hard to impose it to others instead, thinking that by doing that he escapes it. He fears a brazen citizenry that does not flinch in ironing the perceived ripples in his regime. Because deep beneath those flashy steel gauntlets, lie the fragile and puny hands of an old man who knows his time is running.
Well then, it’s a contest of strength. A standoff between elected officials and the very people who grant them power. Let our eyes stay open and let the wrinkles be articulated. The sun could not fear the moon that it emanates light to, if only the sun knows this. The moon, on the other hand, is secretly anxious—so it’s playing an attitude.
