Early in the day, you’re driving routinely on the two-lane road in your village, when a “wang-wang” convoy of SUVs runs head-on to you from the counterflow lane, and you’re forced to jump-swerve to the sidewalk—to give way to “VIPs” who believe it beneath themselves to follow rules—simple traffic rules (there is no traffic standstill, by the way, so there really is no reason to take the counterflow).
Now later in the day, you watch the arrest of the ex-Philippine president to face murder charges or crime against humanity, and you see some in social media asking, in ignorant protest, why, why should he be arrested and face charges for killings. Why?! (This only Catholic country in the region, with a strong Marian devotion, even has to ask.)
Day-to-day living is about bending and breaking rules, if you haven’t yet noticed—and we do it with that signature gracious, hospitable Filipino smile. There’s aberrant behavior when it comes to following rules and obeying laws. If you can jump the queue, why not? If you can pay under the table to cut short the process, why not? Everything is by “areglo” and social/political connections (hard put to translate in English, loosely—“fix”). That is why to be a “fixer” is a career option in many barangays.
But— in his case, the highest executive of the land turned this national aberration into a mandate to kill.
From traffic rules to provisions in the Constitution—there are ways of going around them. Noynoy Aquino, the president who ruled by the Constitution and ironically, who made the Philippines the Rising Tiger of Asia even while doing so, was an oddity in modern Philippine history—he followed the law.
The disbelief and aghast reaction of some quarters to the arrest of the former president are not surprising. How and why should he be made accountable for EJKs, his followers couldn’t figure out in their poisoned minds.
Filipinos ask themselves a recurring question: why do we lag behind even other Third World countries which are even as corrupt as ours, if not more? Perhaps the obvious answer is that other countries make the mighty offenders pay, hold them accountable eventually, and put them behind bars, or worse. Ours? We put them in wheelchairs. In contemporary Philippine politics, hospitals are being made to adopt the post-modern role of political prison, so that, really, the medical professionals should protest this notorious association.
This sense of impunity has become almost ingrained in us, indeed a culture of impunity—and that is what breeds criminals in places high and low, relentlessly. The government we elect, national or local, displays, shows off, a natural sense of impunity. (Even a traffic aide can turn into a tyrant at the intersection.) It’s become a DNA code we are shameless about.
This setting becomes the best breeding ground for troll farms (with limitless logistics and funding, of course) in a country that yields the highest engagement in social media, in an era of fake news and an era of civilization that has nearly abandoned critical thinking. Besides, you cannot think when you’re starving. You can think only “ayuda.”
Plant this culture of impunity in the classroom, in an educational system which is not clearly a priority in governance, and before a young self-entitled generation, and what do you get? Little monsters, to follow the legacy of the monster commander-in-chief. Monsters who are allowed to get away with it, unlike in video games where they are zapped.
Apart from EJKs and human rights violations, this culture of impunity shouldn’t be a tyrant’s legacy we should be stuck with. The innocent deaths and the cases of human rights abuses should be enough sacrifice to make us put an end to this sense of impunity.
We can do more than making memes.
