Terrorism’s silver lining

Dark clouds hover over this frail republic. To the normal litany of mass poverty, widespread ignorance, prevalent diseases and comprehensive social injustice, one lately has had to add explosive terrorism.

The terrorist axis has been defined to include at least Zamboanga and Metro Manila, with these places manifesting ear-splitting, life-shattering civilian bombings. Zamboanga and a few other places in the south has always had their unfair share of dramatic violence and people there have learned to live with the prospects of grenades, bombs (improvised as well as the standard military issue) and other explosives punctuating and at times definitively terminating their day-to-day existence.

Not so Metro Manila and its inhabitants. People in the nation’s capital have much familiarity with the pervasive violence characteristic of weak states and soft societies. Shattered lives in the form of vagabond street children, trafficked women and desperate, jobless men are daily carousels which play themselves recurringly in Metro Manila. A languid picture show of anarchic traffic, smelly garbage and idiotic marionettes in brown, blue and khaki uniforms aimlessly moving around is taken for granted by most of the metropolis’ jaded denizens. From one day to the next, the Metro Manilans’ predictable panorama persists, quietly refreshed with minor variations as when their leaders speak of plenty amidst the citizenry’s obvious dearth.

Quiet violence saps a people’s natural humanity. Faced by the apparently inexorable and quiet march of violence in society, many citizens feel increasingly drained of vitality, unable to struggle from one ruthless moment to the next and resigned to accomodate the violence in their midst. The weakest among them give up on this life and turn to a reassuringly better afterlife. Those who maintain an earthly focus yield to a seductive treatment of progressive self-desensitization. Focused solely on their person and those nearest to them, these people succeed in alienating themselves from the misery of others in their society.

The desensitized actually even physically remove themselves from the greater society of suffering citizens. In their enclaves, behind formidable perimeter walls and secured by fiercely loyal brutes in human and sub-human forms, the powerful and the influential live their lives of plenty, mostly untouched by genuine Christian concern for those who suffer on account of having so little. The churches of plush subdivisions are ever full on Sundays and other holy days, with congenial spiritual advisers preferentially reserving a sanctuary for weddings, baptisms, confirmations, confessions, communions and retreats for those with gifts in this country. In these churches, the fortunate thank their gods for the gifts they receive and seldom importune the latter to look after the unfortunates outside their plush subdivisions ahead of them. The Living God is rarely addressed by those who have desensitized themselves and fled the human fellowship.

The terrorists have struck in Metro Manila. The poor get to be hit first, as usual. A bus with no air conditioning, shorn of DVD players and high fidelity systems hosts only those who must worry about transport fare, who need to scrimp on that extra peso. From this poor beginning, despite the numerous, intricate attempts at securing places and facilities normally reserved for the better-off and the influential, terrorists will predictably work their way up. Inevitably, the beautiful people will have to worry about their places of work — and fun, their homes, their cars and their families. In much the same way that Americans learned of their shared vulnerability to terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, high-end Filipinos may also discover their common cause with those they have at best ignored and quite often preyed upon, the great majority of their much distressed countrymen.

A perceptive scholar of nationalism once remarked that a nation is born out of a people’s experience of common glory and common suffering. In the Philippines, there has been no equitable sharing of either to date. Perhaps, the terrorist attacks and the continuing perils of terrorism may yet induce people in this country to understand that "United we stand, divided we fall" is a maxim with maximum application to the challenge of those who terrorize any society.

Migration is not the most rational option for those who may have the wherewithal to leave this country. Terrorism is not only international in its operations. It is no less than a globalized phenomenon. Wherever one migrates to, one will confront terrorism in all its hideous forms. It can victimize anyone anytime anywhere.

The better option is for people to try working on the very roots of terrorism. Wherever they might be, they would have to do something about improving the material well-being of the poor, liberating the intellectual potentials of so many who are ignorant and become easy prey to irresponsible provocateurs and righting the numerous social injustices obtaining even in the world’s more affluent societies.

An impossible dream? The only other choice is the implacable nightmare that terrorizes us. Giving up on the dream, this nightmare is bound to reduce us first to panic, immediately after to mutually destructive violence and eventually to catatonia, by which time humankind would have transmogrified into another species, a much degraded life form.

We must all work at and for this dream. This dream is the sole silver lining in the darkest cloud of terrorism. Much like the devil in Goethe’s Faust, our present terrorists are creatures who may plot to do evil but somehow cannot help but do good. For those who must work to help realize a universal dream, a wake-up call — even an explosive one detonated by terrorists unimpressed by universal goods – is certainly good.