For a massacre to occur on Week of Peace, it's quite a message from God. I said God because I had been missing Him a lot lately, and also , because I don't think those armed goons keep tab of civil society's calendar of activities to make a point like that. They're mostly illiterates, mind, so they must have no gift of irony to issue a statement like that.
Or, could it be our Godlessness that brought it so?
A few days before that, I and another infidel got ourselves dragged to a peace play . We didn't know it was a peace play, we actually thought it was a gay play, mainly because a gay friend advertised about it to me, and the title sounded to me high action comedy, for us to think it was a rehash of some mother-for-peace-backdrop-Mindanao genre, so when we got seated and found out it was that, I, for one, felt held up and kidnapped and wished I were doing something else instead. The last cultural number that made me cry was Bagong Buwan; after that all the rest were a creel of eels. So when a photographer came around our seats to take a good shot of us and asked us to flash a peace sign, we had to struggle hard to hold our hands from making the dirty finger sign. Punyetang peace, the scowling pagan a seat away from me cussed, enough to send the fotog away. We had been talking about these endless peace programs saturating Mindanao, which we felt were mostly a lot of bullshit, but for the millions that keep pouring in.
Or maybe that is exactly the problem: the millions that keep on pouring in that make people not think anymore of what all these monies could hurt, or who, immediately or in the long run; what all these chromed vehicles cruising through bogs of poverty and despair that fuel all the resentments and the angers as each counted how much, how much did not go to them, do to people’s sense of hope and trust on other people. Was I surprised something like that happened?
No. If you want the truth. It had been there long coming. You could feel it in the air as you get down from those air-conditioned vans wrapped with streamers announcing food for the evacuees or peace peace in Mindanao: in the glances of starved unemployed men that come to you like stabs, in the jokes they make out of water projects and relief goods, in the way the women stare at your blue berried cell phone and fucking camera, or at the pair of rubber shoes you are wearing. In their lack of interest in the questions you pose and the fucking women participation and empowerment issues you peddle as they interview you back: Magkano ang suweldo mo? Am I surprised people down there are capable of such savagery? No. Of course, hold-up is not enough; they know that all your gadgets are easily replenishable now. Kidnap is too much board-and-lodging trouble, especially when there are so many of you vultures for hotspot news. About time the bad news is you.
“At least napasaya natin sila kahit sa isang araw! Nakakita sila ng Amerkano!” a bleeding heart peace advocate driving one of the vans in one of those peace roadshows said as he stepped on the accelerator leaving Datu Odin Sinsuat. Thankfully the windows of the vehicle were closed. The children were beating and scratching with sticks and their fingers at the car’s sides, the day-long waiting for the Melikans must have tired them. “RPG! Padalhan nyo kami ng RPG!” one youth with a Bangsamoro Youth Liberation Front placard shouted. “Dollars! Bigyan ninyo kami ng dollars!” Another yelled. If you don’t feel so good about what you have been doing, you could have guessed that after they threw those fucking placards, they went over to anyone, be it a Mangudadatu or an Ampatuan, for the only employment they can be useful for.
Why weren’t the women lawyers and the journalists spared? Oh. Are they supposed to enjoy divine intervention under the circumstances? Their pos and opos and kasi peace pos were supposed to have saved their pants? They took side, sort of, didn’t they? Or at least they made themselves visible targets, escorting one clan when they weren’t clan ? Who cares about their sex? Who cares if they were artist fags or just some brats with too much talent and little else? And they were escorting one political clan to Comelec, not civilian farmers to their farms or pregnant women to the health center to give birth, and that was innocuous deed ? Even the illiterate pedicab drivers there might have known better.
Gallow slaves hatred doesn’t discriminate. Sure, those savages could not have done it without order from those inconvenienced by human rights and peace issues; but they could not have pulled the trigger with such merriment if they themselves did not share their lord’s pleasure at the butchery.
Next time you think it’s just a clan war that doesn’t involve you, think twice.
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