Kill list entry

I hope I have not seen you and walked on by. Had I encountered you at a street corner and had my heart been wider, would I have looked through you to my all-important destination? Would I have glanced at you, perhaps with the start of a smile? Perhaps you would have called me dodong, manoy, kuya, bai, migo. Were my heart wider, less timid, I would have greeted you back, and each time our paths crossed, we would have grown familiar with each other, and in time known not only each other’s faces, but also each other’s names.

I might never have seen you. At least not until I saw the photograph of your corpse, bullet-ridden, blanketing the hot tar with a viscous, crimson palette. Served you right, the self-assured said. The land needed cleansing, and you were part of the dirt. How could they be so sure? And if they were right in branding you a drug addict, what proof did they have of definitive evil in your heart?

They said too many have died, after rapes, robberies, thefts and other crimes. So you had to go. One more dead did not matter. You no longer mattered, they said. We were fighting criminality. We lacked proof beyond reasonable doubt of your guilt. But we were no court, there was no case and you just looked, oh so criminal. Red eyes. Gaunt frame. Tattered clothes. Sunken cheeks. Ruffled hair. Inelegant speech. At large by night. The rumors supported our dogma. You were an addict. A drug pusher.

Forget that you may have been a near-immaculate soul but for work conditions that inevitably left you looking like the typical pauper. The dusty wind blowing, the tropical air pregnant with moisture, the soot from vehicles — whatever natural or man-made elements you encountered as you dropped passengers off your tricycle or picked them up at the jeepney stop, fried fish balls and tempura to sell on the sidewalk, fixed tires in vulcanizing shops, bore crates and boxes of clothes at the dock, hand-washed a different family’s laundry or tilled a garden that is not yours.

Forget the possibility that you were good. Forget that you were human — someone’s mother, father, sister, brother, friend. Crime statistics stand at all-time highs. We shot you dead, criminal-looking one. We have scared hordes of culprits for real. With the crack of a bullet and your final breath, we have made crowds feel safe. Who cares if the real hoodlums still prowl about seeking the ruin of souls?

Sometimes, all it took to put you on their death row was one accusing finger, or a malicious whisper. You were a criminal. You need not have looked the part. You deserved to die. So the last hymn you sang in choir was your requiem, the last theory you learned by heart for your final high school tests part of your last memories. No more for you vocal exercises. “Where are you going today?” Not for you the scholar’s walk in a scholar’s frock, to the grand strains of “The Graduate,” nor for you the shifting of tassel from one corner of the cap to the other. No toast. No valedictory. Just a eulogy.

And if those who killed you were right and you were an addict, you were beyond redemption. You were never even a victim, just a demon to be utterly crushed. No compassion for you, not even if your cooking and snorting and getting high were irresistible seductions born of your darkness, desolation and deprivations of deep, pure fraternity, friendship and love. You settled for being a victim, might as well be victimized again. We need your carcass to project swift justice and the illusion of security.

So weep, weep, because Solomon’s seat is empty. No wise man stands there. The motherland’s children are really sentenced to be ripped apart, not so sentenced only to draw a maternal cry for clemency, a cry for a way to spare offspring from judgment. The executioners want bodies, the coliseum clamors for spoils in the war against drugs. Weep because our people are glued to the mirage of carnage by non-courts and non-judges lawlessly making up for Lady Justice’s failures.