We are all casualties

The universe, in the great mind of an Einstein, is an interconnected whole. Matter transforms into energy and then into matter again.

Every particle, every atom matters. The configuration of the whole is altered by the loss of an atom.

At that level of abstraction, physics becomes poetry. And when it becomes poetry, it becomes real. The universe in a grain of sand.

If physics is imaginable to the untrained mind, economics should be easier to grasp.

Economics, too, is about interconnectedness. When four hands work to feed two mouths, there is prosperity. When only two hands work and there are four mouths to feed, there is scarcity.

Whether my neighbor chooses to be productive or would rather waste his time shouting idiotic slogans in the streets matters to me. It matters to the prosperity, if not the sanity, of my community.

It matters to all of us when one of us chooses to be functional or dysfunctional. We are all bound by a thread of interconnectedness to the stranger standing next to us or to the small community farthest from our mind.

When all of us become conscious of this interconnectedness, we become more responsible citizens. We will want each one’s actions to be productive so that our social capital expands and our social universe becomes m ore cheerful. We will all want to be helpful to each other so that the communal wealth multiplies to the benefit of all.

When some really insignificant fanatic, some dysfunctional fool, sets off a bomb at the Davao Airport, we are all casualties.

A thousand kilometers away, the stock market plunges. The peso, the means by which we are able or unable to buy the things we need, depreciates dramatically. Tourists don’t come. Companies lay off people. Children go hungry. Common citizens become fearful of the night.

Some of us die at the scene of the crime. Others starve to death without knowing a crime happened. Without knowing they were victims of an act of madness.

They heard no explosion. And an economy imploding makes no sound. But it kills just the same.

Every act of terror, every senseless gesture of violence, produces a black hole in our tenuous social universe. It usurps resources. It saps our collective energies. It taxes our optimism.

It makes losers of us all.

Mayor Rudy Duterte beat his breast and took the attack personally. He has taken it upon himself to go after the perpetrators of yet another act of madness inflicted on his gentle city.

That is not his privilege alone.

All of us are justified in taking this event as a personal grief. We have all been injured by this attack. Someone lost a limb and someone else a life. A neighbor lost his job and my children’s prospects for employment narrowed a bit.

In a word, someone stole an atom from my personal universe.

All of us have a right to be outraged. All of us have a duty to fight the black hole of senseless violence that threatens to consume our national community.

Rudy Duterte must not be left a solitary avenger in the wilderness of a terrorized society. There are too many indecent men who inflict crime on the vulnerable, bring violence to the peaceful. These indecent men violate us by breaking into our homes. They violate us by planting bombs in crowded places.

They violate the poor by extorting "revolutionary taxes" from them through the barrel of a gun. They bomb power lines and bring us discomfort. They burn buses and immobilize us. They create a thousand points of chaos that perturbs our social universe.

Order can only be restored by the active vigilance of entire communities. This means that all of us must be vigilantes, each fighting the scourge of indecent men from where he stands and by the weapon he is best able to wield.

It has been said: Evil triumphs only when there are enough good men willing to do nothing.

The anonymity of modern society, of large congregations where the idea of communal responsibility becomes abstract, creates vulnerability. It makes it easier to pass blame or expect others to do what must be done.

In the crevices of anonymity, terrorism blooms and threatens the possibility that societies may be both modern and orderly.

I do not quite understand the discourse of the timid: Those who say that a "culture of peace" may be established if the authorities refrain from attacking those obviously organized to attack us.

That seems to be an argument attractive only to those with marshmallows in their skulls. It depends too much on the expectation that armed and dangerous fanatics may be goaded by prayer or by pleading, into deciding one fine morning that they will bring cheerfulness to our communities instead of war.

In my book, a "culture of peace" can only be built on a common appreciation of the value of order. That common appreciation must be an enforceable contract.

An enforceable contract simply means that if you break my peace, I break your neck. It rests on the expectation that outraged citizens will be empowered to do something about those who diminish the orderliness of our social universe.

Like Rudy Duterte, all of us have the right to fight back.

My preferred weapon is a pen. But a gun may also produce results.