FORGIVE

That word punctuates the vocabulary of many today who believe that the atrocities during the Marcos dictatorship should just be forgotten.

“Move on!” is the twin partner of the hideous advice for Martial Law victims to suck it up and live with the traumas of the past.

“Forgive” and “Move on” are words used now as a blunt instrument to suppress protests against the burial as national hero of Marcos, the ousted dictator, offender to Martial Law victims, head honcho of global-scale cronyism, ignominious despot, and disgraced liar!

It would be disingenuous to say that Marcos was buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani merely as former President and soldier, two lofty positions that he dishonored with abuse and corruption.

Libingan is symbolic of honor and highest esteem for those who valiantly and selflessly served country and people ahead of oneself, the definition of heroism.

Marcos’s burial at Libingan is no ordinary event that merely inters a former President and solider. It was meant to make him a hero and thus rehabilitate his place in history by its blatant revisionism.

Marcos doesn’t deserve this honor. It is vainglorious for his family to believe that history would be kind in judging their discredited kin.

But they get help from those (especially Christians) that now demand forgiveness, in the name of healing and reconciliation, from Martial Law victims and the nation as a whole that the dictatorship also victimized.

They take inspiration from many admonitions in the Bible to forgive.

If Christ forgave those who killed him, how can we not do the same to a despicable despot, like Marcos?

Not mentioned in this counsel is the wile and scheme that while we are busy forgiving they will also bury him as a hero!

It is true that Jesus called on his followers to forgive. It is a radical demand with which we cannot trifle.

It would be important to see its application for Christ’s followers amid the chaos of the country we are in.

Forgiveness is to take upon our own account the wrong committed by others against us. We don’t retaliate against an offender. We offer the other cheek, if we get slapped on the other. We don’t return the pain inflicted on us by our enemies.

The biblical admonition to forgive allows for the highest expression of love.

We love others to the point of death in imitation of Christ’s ultimate show of love by accepting the violence of the cross. His death took upon his own account the sins of others.

The admonition to forgive is addressed to us to extend grace to those who have offended us. It’s a call for us to wrestle with the demand of love through forgiveness when we are the victims.

And this is key: the admonition is directed to us. We cannot pontificate on forgiveness by demanding others to forgive and avoid directing the admonition to ourselves.

Even if we have extended forgiveness already, we avoid pouncing on the heads of those who haven’t. To do so would be arrogant, sanctimonious, and judgmental of those whose shoes we don’t walk on.

We should not use the call to forgive as a political instrument to silence the expression of pain, and even of protest, of those that have been victimized and whose grievances have yet to be redressed.

Society cannot moralize on forgiveness and at the same time countenance victimhood without paying a price.

Injustice must be redressed that’s why we have structures like Rule of Law to prevent abuse and impunity.

Without justice and accountability for the victims, our society will not be aright and we will all be losers for it.

Righteousness (or, justice, if you will) is the end goal. Our collective pursuit of that goal is declaration that despots would never ever be welcomed in our midst—much more be treated as hero—to again inflict harm on the country.

To attain righteousness, forgiveness is merely one side of the equation. Righteousness requires not only forgiveness from the victims. Its other pillar is contrition by the offender.

Forgiveness and contrition lead to justice. Without one or the other, healing and restoration will not occur.

Restorative justice requires both elements. Much like in case of marital abuse, healing and restoration will elude a marriage if the abuse remains even if the victim forgives the abuser.

Those who call on the victims to forgive the atrocities of the Marcos dictatorship should equally demand contrition from the offender.

While he is already dead, his family and heirs can do much to amend the wrongs he committed. (By the way, his minions should also be made to account.) They can start by returning his loot and redressing the grievances of the disappeared and tortured during Martial Law.

For our society to flourish, righteousness should reign.

To achieve righteousness, we should call on all sides to do what is required of them: for the victims to forgive, and for the offenders to show contrition and offer reparation for the damages they have caused.

To call on the victims to forgive but allow offenders to go scot free, and even to be buried as hero, is to perpetuate evil and promote impunity and injustice.

When we have achieved both forgiveness and contrition, then we move on.

SICK CHRISTIANITY

Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot and killed on August 9, 2014, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. It set off weeks of protestagainst policing that easily targets black men.

Willie James Jennings, writing in Religion Dispatches in December 2014, after a grand jury decided not to indict the police officer, expressed disgust over Christianity he called “sick” that is at ease with violence in the name of law and order. He said, “Too often, Christians…have given sanctuary to the spirit of fear, commending a form of policing that makes violence a surgeon’s scalpel, imagining our safety in the illusion of its measured use.” He warned that, “Violence knows no measure.”

The Philippine National Police has recently released the number of killed in the Philippine government’s war on drugs from July 1 until December 1, 2016. The number of deaths has totaled to 5,845. Of this number, 2,004 were killed during police operations, and 3,841 are victims of extrajudicial vigilante-style killing. An average of 39 people are killed EVERY DAY over the last five months in drug-related incidents.

These numbers are staggering and have reached the levels we have seen of deaths during the whole duration of martial law. And they are increasing by the day! If the trend continues, at the same time next year we will see about 20,000 people killed in the government’s war on drugs.

The government has hidden behind the “presumption of regularity” in the performance of duties in the police operations that resulted in 2,004 deaths. This has stopped police investigation except for the most egregious cases, like the Espinosa killing inside Leyte’s sub-provincial jail in Baybay. (Even in this case, the President quickly absolved the police officers involved and even admitted having a hand in keeping them in position despite their previous connections to the drug trade.) The rest of the victims in the incidents where the police are not purportedly involved are filed as “Deaths Under Investigation.” Few, if any, have been arrested or indicted in any DUI cases.

If this is not a situation of impunity in our country, I don’t know what is!

As Jennings would say, it would be a sick Christianity if it remains at ease with violence and killings in the name of war on drugs.

Killing is never a Christian value. Violence in the Old Testament (genocide, infanticide, capital punishment, you name it) is turned over by the gospel of love that Jesus propagated and lived by, modeling what it should be like for followers in his Kingdom. Jesus did not come to destroy the law but to fulfill it, which found its achievement by his sacrifice on the cross. The Messiah who died to offer salvation even for his enemies cannot be at ease with the rate of killings we’re seeing today in our country.

Everyone deserves salvation and enjoys equal value in God’s sight no matter how atrocious their life choices have been. We are all created as image bearers of God and object of his eternal love. Because of Christ, we cannot align with any government that diminishes human life, even in the name of law and order.

To kill is not part of the Christian arsenal in our mission to transform communities. We should be in the forefront of defending everyone’s right to live and be changed by God’s love. We should reject the idea that someone has passed the line of incorrigibility and deserves to die. Remember that with God nothing is impossible! The gospel is not meant to condemn and punish, but to restore and heal.

Sick Christianity would gloss over the tough demands of love and would lamely acquiesce to killings in the name of tough law enforcement to lick society’s drug problem even in the absence of credible evidence that such strategy has ever worked anywhere in the world. And at the rate it is bungling its job so far there is no indication at all that the Philippine Government could be the shining exception to the global record of failure of the war on drugs.

Sick Christianity hides behind a (too) narrow reading of Scriptures that purports to mandate that the only form of political engagement available to Christians is, one, ‘to pray’ for the government, and, two, ‘to submit’ (sometimes misread as ‘to obey’) to authorities, based on two or three proof texts written in eras so unlike ours.

Such a reading totally misses the message of the Gospels and Acts, whose core message is a protest to Caesar’s claim that he is king, because he is not. The good news is that Jesus is the true King!

No one is King today, other than Jesus. Our elected government has not attained perfection and will never do so to be spared from criticism and even protest if they do stray and pursue policies and actions opposed to the values of the Kingdom. God’s instituting of governments is meant to preserve the good and curtail evil for the benefit of the people. God’s imprimatur of governments to be instrument of order and the flourishing of humanity does not provide governments and its officials with immunity from being called out for their failures in governance and weakness in character.

Indeed, we should fervently pray for and wisely submit to government. But these critical activities cannot be made to justify our lack of action in allowing evil to continue.

Every killing bleeds the heart of God. Be it committed in Mendiola, Mamasapano, Hacienda Luisita and the war on drugs. If it bleeds the heart of God, it should also bleed ours. Sick Christianity prevents us from such lament. 

TRAUMA

When we see duct-taped corpses thrown in the streets of our neighborhoods almost on a daily basis, its repulsiveness wears off at some point in our consciousness.

These killings everyday have inured us all to its unpleasantness. “It happens!”

Then off we go to where we can nurse our traumas from this violence in our midst.

EJKs or not, the fact is thousands have been killed over the last four months. Even the number of killings that are not reportedly part of police operations still tallies in the thousands.

Indeed, we are in a state of lawlessness!

How are we supposed to deal with all this?

Apparently, with a new category upon which to hook our suspended outrage: “Death Under Investigation.”

DUI—didn’t this use to refer to Driving Under the Influence?

A clear case of oblique deflection, if I see one, to our fears that our country has not yet really attained Singapore-like zone of safety.

It’s like numbing our brains by drinking our problems away. “Don’t worry, these killings are DUI!” 

In our justice system the police would generally wait first for complainants to materialize before doing anything about the crime.

The reality is most aggrieved parties and survivors of the victims in these killings don’t approach the police for various reasons, including the fear that the precinct itself had something to do with the murder. To expect them to go to the police is like asking the rape victim to go back to her rapist for protection. And that would just turn out really well!

“Death Under Investigation” is another way of saying that the crime will never be solved. The police know a murder has been committed but they have no idea how to solve it yet.

This state of affairs is nothing less than a state-sanctioned national trauma. There will be no closure to these killings and we just have to deal with it!

The President has threatened that if things don’t go his way, expect 20 to 30 thousand more killed as a result.

Not sure whether he means the government will do the extra killings, or the killing spree will continue by whoever is committing them now. I’m trying to kick into my creative imagination mode to figure this one out.

The only way I can divine the President’s logic is this: he is threatening that if the killings don’t stop (presumably what he wants), the killings will go on. Brilliant!

Meanwhile, off we go to where we can nurse our traumas from this violence in our midst.