It always bothers him to think how easily the world is changed by people who would do what few others are willing to do, acts so unthinkable they qualify as inhuman. And he wonders: What can move humans to do that?
His own tendency to romanticize mysterious acts leads him to think they must have gone through events in their lives, so tragic and hurting, these acts become rational. But as it now seems, the perpetrators seem not old enough to have gone through any of those events. They seem not capable of realizing exactly what they are doing. It is more likely they are driven by an inertia of religion, ideology, and politics, much in the same way we all are; and just as much, our own young people, now, and even more so, in times past.
This is why he presumes none of us, no matter how qualified by wealth, power, or wisdom, have an absolute sense of what can be done to make our world better or even solve our most immediate problems. What he is sure of is that the greatest and most profound changes of the world came not from an arrogance that lead to violence and murder. They came instead from humility, which tests the rightfulness of intentions by staying absolutely within peaceful means.
He remembers immediately Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King. He remembers Jesus Christ.
He remembers his first engagements with peaceful change. It was toward the time of Marcos’s martial law, a bit before 1972, when he gathered with his elder sister and brother and their activist friends at the roadside outside what used to be Cebu’s Magellan Hotel. They bore placards protesting the ostentatious expense which went into the late Julio Cardinal Rosales’s purchase of his new official wardrobe, expenses which came in the face of so much exploitation and poverty in the country.
His family taught him that this was the way the world would be changed or made a little better; not by the force of violence, but through the peaceful means of expressing what one feels in his or her mind and heart. He was made to understand that this simple act is not without risks. In the course of time, he came to understand how this act would often be met with violence by those who are in power and fear change.
His first teenage exposure to mass action, as it was called in those days, did not result in violence. The newspapers came, and the next day, they came out in the newspapers, proving that in the face of opulent pageantry, there were at least a few young Cebuanos to remind everyone: Not all was well with everything.
Not all the mass actions he joined from then on came to such a peaceful end. Many others ended with rocks thrown and fire trucks coming in with water cannons to break apart the gatherings.
These all seemed inevitable. And while there were many times when “at the ramparts” he wondered if all these mass actions would ever amount to anything, times when he wondered if they were better off using the gun instead, by 1986, martial law would be ended. This did not solve everything by any means. But it did prove how peaceful change was possible. And he did not have to kill anybody or cause anybody’s death to be a part of it. It could have gone another way.
Jim, his geologist friend, informed him how the geographic land itself often changes in cataclysmic events, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc. He would add here how historical and social change often comes the same way. And they come in cycles having crests and troughs.
The wake of the Friday the 13th killings in Paris has led to rightists everywhere mouthing the most fascist reactions to these events: Close the borders! Drop more bombs! Put more boots on the ground! Experience has told him how nobody hates a fascist more than another fascist of a different political color. Those who advocate slow and peaceful solutions to these problem will now be called, hippies, peaceniks, and cowards, as they always have been. This is the way violence begets more violence. It is how violent people destroy themselves in the course of history: With a ridiculous arrogance of brainless power and violence.
And still the most meaningful changes coming to this world will come from people who would do it another way. Today he remembers Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Jesus Christ. They did so much. They killed no one.