The world is waiting the sunrise, And every rose is covered with dew.
—From a post-World War 1 song
By December, the best Christmas gift was the arrival of the vaccine. It came under not one but many brands: some were vetted to be good; the others were prime suspect for side effects ranging from mild to grave.
This was a human achievement, a feat that did not remain in the obscure world of scientific discoveries. The old adage about necessity as the mother of invention came into fruition. There was a need for a vaccine.
Early on, the leader of our republic bragged about having a vaccine. Where it came from or from where it would be sourced, no one knew. Some time in September and November, news came out that the country did not have enough fund for the vaccine.
By December, with brands of vaccine being bandied around and with photos of a Filipino nurse doing the first vaccination in London, news began to filter in that we may not be able to secure the vaccine by December, and not even by January. The news was vague as everything else that comes out of the mouthpieces of this government.
Metaphors of someone dropping the ball circulated. The hope for cure was reduced to a ball, or a handling of it. Some of us waited for someone to be dubbed having no balls. But the toxicity of press releases stopped at the gate of vestigial propriety.
We may be fighting each other in the realm of politics and economics (i.e., power and greed) but we always have this tender cruelty in us to stop and look, and congratulate each other for our organic love for the country and our countrymen. The feeling, of course, like all pretenses, is vacuous but convincing, providing as it does the bed of a national psychosis.
Strange for a government that is not built on a nation that our frailty is regularly labeled part of our national character.
That character would have a grand performance this December. If our lives as Filipinos were a dictionary, the word “vaccine” would be followed by another word beginning in “V,” and that would be “violence.”
Less than a week before Christmas, a video circulated in the Internet and through other forms of social media. This was about a policeman who shot to death a mother and son, while his daughter stood by.
As soon as the video and the news came out, there was conflagration online. The policeman was condemned, and rightly so. Many condemned also the daughter, whereupon the politically correct in many of us raised a flag to urge that we leave the girl out of the murder. I could imagine many of us were theorizing about the incident, framing that act within abuse of power and the prevailing atmosphere of impunity.
Are those urging us to leave the girl the same people who would imbue the child the right to his or her own body? Where are we with children and young people? Do we still know our children? Have we lost them to technologies?
The others demanded the context for the shooting.
What excuses are there needed for a murder to be forgotten or forgiven? A murder is a murder. A policeman stands by close to the mother, despair and helplessness in her body and face, who embraces her son as if her hands around him could save him from anything. Only mothers could understand that gesture; only women who took care of children and other men would believe in the sanctity of embrace. But the man whose authority is gripped by a hand with the gun is formidable. He will not be stopped. His daughter stands by formidable as well, or even more formidable because she has a policeman for a father.
Here is an exercise: Remove the sound; forget about the story. Watch simply how the act unfolds. Then rage. Do not think. Philosophical thoughts and psychological babbles have made us inured to violence and not protected from it. We have become the true homo sapiens, thinking in the face of acts that do not demand intelligence.
Go back to the video. Behold the face of the young girl now blurred because we are protecting her. There are new postings pleading we do not drag the girl into the issue. But the girl is part of it. We are sourcing ideologies about youths that are ancient and have not been tested presently. Only adults commit crimes, or so we believe. We have made of caveats new principles in living.
We have evolved.
We are our own violence.
While two people are already dead, the video is still alive online. We can view it over and over. The third time, or even as early as the second time, we watch the video: the senseless death of a mother and child and the senseless power of the policeman begin to make sense. As for the daughter protected by so many laws and her age, there are words that come across as felicitations wishing she would recover from the trauma of that incident, and grow into a nice person. We pray that she learns from the lesson of that day, afterall the years that will follow will all be founded on a mother and her son whose deaths, whether she likes it or not, ties her to any heaven or hell.
As for us, it appears no thinking matters now. No poetry is ever graceful or mournful to advocate peace or rage.
The world is waiting for the sunrise while we continue to contemplate hope in a forever sunset. An angry street awaits if the light of the next day does not come upon us.
And so, Merry Christmas.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com