Be careful with using labels

BAGUIA

Spaces of emergence pertain to a realm within a media ecology where dialogue partners are allowed to project their multifaceted selves.

In today’s media ecology, spaces of emergence are under threat because channels of communication tend to prevent holistic portrayals of persons.

The channels, however, are not necessarily to blame.

Users always have the choice of using them in a way that is conducive to allowing mediatized persons ample freedom from one-dimensional representations.

Media consumers too have a responsibility to remember that persons represented in the media are more than their representations.
There is more to a source than his framing in journalism and in other media contexts.

This point is so important not only within the media but within broader human communication where we tend to put labels on one another.
A person is more than the labels we rightly or wrongly attach to him.

In political exchanges, Filipinos often use shortcuts to summarize an interlocutor’s political position. There are people who call supporters of President Rodrigo Duterte “Dutertards.” There are people who refer to supporters of the Liberal Party “Dilawan.”

Having been labeled a “Dilawan” somewhere on the internet by a former classmate, I assume no one will begrudge my use of self as an example of being deprived of a space of emergence.

Based on my observation, “Dilawan” is the caricature of an unrepentant and dogmatic supporter of the Liberal Party in general and of the leaderships of former presidents Corazon Aquino and of her son Benigno Aquino III in particular.

I suspect the “Dilawan” is a specter conjured by the unscrupulous among supporters of the current President to give the less discerning in their bailiwicks a punching bag to vent their ire on as they defend his leadership.

Is there a real “Dilawan” as pictured by those seeking a scapegoat to taint with intent to topple the current dispensation?
I voted for Benigno Aquino III when he ran for the highest office in the land in 2010.

Nevertheless, those who followed my old column “Glimmers from Patmos” that appeared once to twice a month in the Faith section of Cebu Daily News know that I wrote a number of pieces to register vehement opposition to the enactment of the Reproductive Health law, the former president’s pet piece of legislation.

The law has been declared partly constitutional by the Supreme Court, yet portions of it cannot be implemented due to a standing injunction on contraceptive implants that are harmful to women.

Colleagues and students can also attest that I joined in the last presidency the movement for an end to the allotment of Priority Development Assistance or pork barrel funds to legislators.

With others, I marched to Plaza Independencia in Cebu City to protest coursing tax money for infrastructure projects through senators and congressmen. This was declared unconstitutional by the High Court in 2013.

A few years ago, fellow journalists and I performed in the city’s Rizal library a skit with rap music protesting the indiscriminate building of flyovers by the public works department under the younger Aquino.

Thank heavens, my loyalties have never been blind. In 2001, I joined the march to Fuente Osmeña during the second Edsa People Power Revolution when Joseph Estrada was deposed from and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo swept into the presidency.

I joined citizens in prayer when soldiers attempted a mutiny against Arroyo under the leadership, among others, of now Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV.

Yet I wore the white ribbon of protest against Arroyo when the “Hello, Garci” electoral scandal came to light, and when the time came, backed the second impeachment complaint against Arroyo.

A citizen can be conscientious enough to know when to support a leader and to know when policies are so harmful as to merit resistance.

The problem with labels is that their users tend to convict the labeled of a fanaticism that is present only in the labeler.

Elsewhere on the internet, a stranger has labeled me a defender of addicts.

This is welcome inasmuch as I have been saying that people who have addictions do not lose their humanity. They remain human, and it is our responsibility to help them rediscover their dignity.

We should not let Duterte tell us who is human and who is not.

The label is unwelcome insofar as it comes with the misinterpretation that I have no compassion for the victims of criminals.

No human being remains untouched by crime, whether its perpetrators are state authorities or not.

Yet we would all be better off as a nation if we devote ourselves to a justice that restores rather than to one that enables a culture of revenge.

We should not take refuge in the parable of the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to seek and save the one that went astray only when we ourselves are the black sheep.

Faith and righteousness are purified when we can extend its blessings, protections and mercies to those whom we tend to instinctively count among the cruel.

A critique of government based on this train of thought is no outgrowth of reckless anarchism. It is legitimate resistance and positive citizenship that

seeks purification of leadership.
A leadership and its support group that is closed to charitable critique accomplishes its own implosion.