BAGUIA
As of the close of the first month of 2017, more than seven thousand people have died in the Philippine government’s narcotics war, both in police operations and unexplained killings.
Do we still care?
Blood coats the streets.
Ah, but there is plenty of noise in the air, a lot of buzz to muffle and mute the sounds of assassins’ guns, victims’ screams and dying gasps and their loved ones’ mournful sobs.
The world’s loveliest women by beauty magazine standards are here and hold us pageant-crazy islanders in thrall.
Somewhere in these parts, sometime in December, a girl was on her way to dawn Mass in preparation for Christmas.
A stray bullet struck her dead.
We do not honor her horrible death, but we shall not forget the beauty of her final act in life — waking up in her pubescent age to pray while the east still blanketed the sun.
Earlier this month, the lead dancer of a southwestern town’s contingent to the Sinulog festival caught the attention of audiences. The reason, they said, is that she is a dead ringer for a Hollywood actress.
Beauty is no more than skin-deep, a Hollywood star once said, unless one longed for an adorable pancreas.
Stars can be mistaken. In more discerning eyes, the beauty of the youth who has gone by the moniker Ginatilan girl has little to do with the fairness of her complexion or the allure of her bearing.
She scintillated in a dance of faith, a choreography of prayer. Her beauty could be grasped in invisible depths that may yet be apprehended and recounted through memory.
I never had an audience with her, but I guess she must have gone through what my cousin and his siblings went through around this time of the year before they settled down on distant shores — weeks, even months of rehearsals to perfect dance steps to offer as a prayer to the baby Jesus.
Building a performance worth presenting as a message to the divine — that is poetry, that is a deep beauty.
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Malacañang’s henchmen have entered with their boss a new round of their favorite game — try to cow the clergy.
But that the church has an execrable dimension is not news. The assertion is simply noise meant to weaken the sting of homilies in defense of human life preached on pulpits across the archipelago.
I listened to a beautiful one on a night before the Feast of the Holy Child. The priest recounted the story of reaching out to persons who used to be addicted to drugs.
Neither fear generated by the war against drugs nor lectures about the evils of narcotics help former dependents on the road to recovery, the priest said. Only love does.
At the end of his visit to about 70 persons in rehabilitation, the priest said, he embraced each of them.
A word from the last man he hugged touched the priest, and, I believe, everyone who listened to him.
“Thank you, Father,” the man in rehabilitation said. “For the first time in my life, I feel that I am loved. I feel that I am not a forsaken beast.”