Voice of terror

Although killings have become a daily occurrence across the Philippines, we Filipinos ought not to get used to them.

No matter how hard it is to resist getting desensitized to news of the bloodshed, we ought not to become incapable of receiving it with grief over the slain, with compassion for the bereaved, and with outrage.

Human life is cheap in the language of President Rodrigo Duterte whose motto appears to be “I will kill you.”

But the devaluing of human life was never and will never be part of his or of any government official’s job description.

After gunmen slew priests from various ecclessiastical territories, the President told the public the blame should not be ascribed to him.

But he and his supporters misunderstand calls for him to eliminate violence from his speech.

Whether there have been direct orders from Duterte to shoot dead particular persons is debatable (he consistently rephrases his lethal words when they get heat), but critics are exact when they assert that his and his administration’s penchant for words that encourage killing emboldens not only policemen but also those who have no license to use or possess firearms.

Also encouraged are supporters of the President who unwittingly or otherwise find in his death-dealing pronouncements normative grounds for crafting their own justifications of the carnage in our time.

Many of our compatriots have slipped from holding that “Killing is wrong” to believing that the extrajudicially killed must have been evil because they were shot dead.

Many now approve of the perverse method of killing first in the cynical belief that the lawless taking of someone’s life will be eventually found to have served that person right.

Duterte himself tried to explain away the slaying of a priest by lending credence to allegations that the deceased had affairs with at least eight women.

So it has come to this. The highest official in the land no longer finds urgency in running after the perpetrators of gun violence but is eager to dish out rumors about the victims.

It comes as no surprise that we hear no news from law enforcers regarding the pursuit and incarceration of illegal arms manufacturers, traders, and smugglers that ought to be central to preserving the peace.

What will happen to cases such as the deadly shooting of Cebu lawyer Salvador Solima, of mayors, vice mayors, priests, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters elsewhere in the country?

Will they remain unsolved because they deserved their deaths anyway or because the police are busy rounding up the shirtless and the loiterers?

The President may deny responsibility as often and as crassly as he wishes to, but he cannot twist logic.

He has become the principle and herald of lawless violence in our land and if he wishes not to go down in history as this nation’s face and voice of terror he should enter into radical if not penitential silence.