EDITORIAL – Witnesses are great learners

Last Friday, local newspapers carried on their front pages photos of yet another victim of vigilantes, summarily killed for alleged crimes that never saw due process. The count now stands at more than 120 since the executions began a year ago.

Are Cebuanos alarmed? Probably not anymore. We do not have any means to measure tolerance limits, but a hundred and twenty dead, more or less, ought to be enough to harden even the most morally squeamish.

Do we then approve of it? Of course not. Never, since day one. But can we take it? Well, we may hem and haw, hypocrisy masquerading as self-preservation kicking in. In the end, what is there to lie for? We may never take it. But, boy, have we learned to look away.

Even the Roman Catholic Church has clammed up on the issue. Once, Cebu Archbishop Ricardo Cardinal Vidal tried to take issue. The good prelate even chose one of the holiest times in the Cebuano calendar -- the Red Mass on the feast of the Santo Niño -- to voice his displeasure.

But the man who admitted to have inspired the killings only scoffed at the cardinal. If Vidal had not been a man of the cloth, he would have received a severe tongue-lashing. After that feeble attempt at opposition, everything went downhill. The killings proceeded at will.

Yet, probably unnoticed by many, the killings have brought one more tragedy to the once peaceful life of the Cebuanos. The killings have benumbed the sensitivities of people, most especially the children.

Worse, these summary executions, all done in public, dead bodies being left in the open for everyone to see, may be inspiring the wrong notions in these children, sending the wrong messages to their young impressionable hearts and minds that all killing is somehow okay.

Last Friday's newspaper pictures captured by photojournalists showed not just the body of the latest victim of a vigilante killing but a group of very young children as well, squatting just a few feet away.

Pictures may paint a thousand words but there is no way of precisely telling what raced in those young minds. But we have a fairly good idea of what they could be. And we are very certain that their thoughts will manifest themselves in a very bad way just a few years from now.